Dynamic Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Clusters

Abstract

The dynamic load balancing techniques, practically, do not assume any information about the tasks to be executed at compilation time. Parameters like execution time or communication time are unknown at compilation time. These techniques are used to distribute the computation tasks of an application between different processors at execution time to achieve some defined performance objectives [1]. In this paper we present a dynamic load balancing algorithm designed especially for heterogeneous network of workstations . The algorithm distributes the parallel tasks dynamically attempting to minimize its execution time. The experiments are done over a network of workstation interconnected via a fast Ethernet. It is a Linux cluster which has some degree of heterogeneity in the processing nodes. Our algorithm is shown to be efficient in increasing the resource utilization and reducing the total execution time of the applications.