A Trace-Driven Simulation Study of Dynamic Load Balancing
Abstract
A trace-driven simulation study of dynamic load balancing in homogeneous distributed systems supporting broadcasting is presented. We use information about job CPU and I/O demands collected from a production system as input to a simulation model that includes a representative CPU scheduling policy and considers the message exchange and job transfer costs explicity. Seven load balanced algorithms are simulated and their performances compared. We find that load balancing is capable of significantly reducing the mean and standard deviation of job response times, especially under heavy system load, and for jobs with high resource demands. The performances of all hosts, even those originally with light loads, are generally improved by load balancing. The reduction of the mean response time increases with the number of hosts, but levels off at around 30 hosts. Algorithms based on periodic or non-periodic load information exchange provide similar performance, and, among the periodic policies, the algorithms that use a distinguished agent to collect and distribute load information cut down the overhead and scale better.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA179323
Entities
People
- Songnian Zhou
Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley