Task partitioning, scheduling and load balancing strategy for mixed nature of tasks

Abstract

Load balancing and task partitioning are important components of distributed computing. The optimum performance from the distributed computing system is achieved by using effective scheduling and load balancing strategy. Researchers have well explored CPU, memory, and I/O-intensive tasks scheduling, and load balancing techniques. But one of the main obstacles of the load balancing technique leads to the ignorance of applications having a mixed nature of tasks. This is because load balancing strategies developed for one kind of job nature are not effective for the other kind of job nature. We have proposed a load balancing scheme in this paper, which is known as Mixed Task Load Balancing (MTLB) for Cluster of Workstation (CW) systems. In our proposed MTLB strategy, pre-tasks are assigned to each worker by the master to eliminate the worker's idle time. A main feature of MTLB strategy is to eradicate the inevitable selection of workers. Furthermore, the proposed MTLB strategy employs Three Resources Consideration (TRC) for load balancing (CPU, Memory, and I/O). The proposed MTLB strategy has removed the overheads of previously proposed strategies. The measured results show that MTLB strategy has a significant improvement in performance.