An Experimental Evaluation of Load Balancing Strategies
Report ID: TR-112-87Author: Alonso, Rafael
Date: 1987-09-00
Pages: 11
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Abstract:
In this paper we report on an experimental study of load balancing strategies for a network of workstations. We have implemented a load balancing mechanism on which a variety of strategies have been tested. Our current implementation runs on a local area network composed of a variety of Sun workstations. Some of the difficulties involved in developing a practical load balancing mechanism are described, as well as our suggested solutions to those problems. Among the issues addressed are how to avoid instabilities in the decision policy (especially in the case where the load balancing mechanism must deal with incomplete load information), and how to implement load sharing in an environment where the individual processors are owned by separate users (clearly, on such networks, policies that evenly spread the load throughout the system are not appropriate).