No abstract

SUMMARYDistributed computing systems are a viable and less expensive alternative to parallel computers. However, a serious difficulty in concurrent programming of a distributed system is how to deal with scheduling and load balancing of such a system which may consist of heterogeneous computers. Some distributed scheduling schemes suitable for parallel loops with independent iterations on heterogeneous computer clusters have been designed in the past. In this work we study self-scheduling schemes for parallel loops with independent iterations which have been applied to multiprocessor systems in the past. We extend one important scheme of this type to a distributed version suitable for heterogeneous distributed systems. We implement our new scheme on a network of computers and make performance comparisons with other existing schemes.

In this paper, we review two existing static load balancing schemes based on M/M/1 queues. We then use these schemes to propose two dynamic load balancing schemes for multi-user (multi-class)

In this paper we present a game theoretic approach to solve the static load balancing problem in a distributed system which consists of heterogeneous computers connected by a single channel communication network. We use a cooperative game to model the load balancing problem. Our solution is based on the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) which provides a Pareto optimal solution for the distributed system and is also a fair solution. An algorithm for computing the NBS is derived for the proposed cooperative load balancing game. Our scheme is compared with that of other existing schemes under simulations with various system loads and configurations. We show that the solution of our scheme is near optimal and is superior to the other schemes in terms of fairness. [17,7,9,16,6] or applied game theory without taking into account the communication subsystem [4,3,14].The main goal of our load balancing scheme is to provide fairness to all the jobs, i.e. all the jobs should experience the same expected response time independent of the allocated computer. The fairness of allocation is an important factor in modern distributed systems and our scheme will be suitable for systems in which the fair treatment of the users' jobs is as important as other performance characteristics. We show that our cooperative load balancing scheme not only provides fairness but also provides a Pareto optimal operating point for the entire system. We make simulations with various system loads and configurations to evaluate the performance of our cooperative load balancing scheme. Cooperative Game Theory ConceptsIn this section, we summarize some concepts and results from cooperative game theory which are used in the sequel.

Distributed systems (e.g. a LAN of computers) can be used for concurrent processing for some applications. However, a serious difficulty in concurrent programming of a distributed system is how to deal with scheduling and load balancing of such a system which may consist of heterogeneous computers. Distributed scheduling schemes suitable for parallel loops with independent iterations on heterogeneous computer clusters have been proposed and analyzed in the past. Here, we implement the previous schemes in the CORBA (Orbix). We also present an extension of these schemes implemented in a hierarchical master-slave architecture. We present experimental results and comparisons.