A load balanced distributed computing system

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to transform a network of workstations into a load balanced distributed computing system (LBDCS). LBDCS is to improve the performance of generally underutilized timeshared workstations and highly CPU intensive independent or parallel applications. It affects the initial placement of the tasks and task migrations later during their executions. One of the important implementation features of LBDCS is that it does not use any intermediary such as PVM (parallel virtual machine) or MPI (message passing interface) for inter-task communication. It defines various metrics to characterize the level of load and dynamically monitors the system and applications to detect the load imbalances. The employed load balancing algorithm makes use of predicted load indices which are computed as weighted averages of the past system and application loads. Performance analysis of the system has been conducted using a number of hypothetical applications and two simple real life applications (in this case matrix multiplication and merge-sort). Hypothetical applications provide flexibility for testing the system under tunable application conditions. Using load balancing, an average speedup and efficiency close to 70% of their theoretical upper bounds are observed for different applications. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.