Effective Load Sharing on Heterogeneous Networks of Workstations  

Li. Xiao, Xiaodong Zhang, and Yanxia Qu 
 
Proceedings of 2000 International Parallel and Distributed Processing  
Symposium, (IPDPS'00), Cancun, Mexico, May 2000, pp. 431-438. 

We consider networks of workstations which are not only time-sharing, but
also heterogeneous with a large variation in the computing power and
memory capacities of different workstations. Many load sharing
schemes mainly target sharing CPU resources, and have been intensively
evaluated in homogeneous distributed environments. However, the penalties
of data accesses and movement in modern computer systems, such as page faults,
have grown to the point where the overall performance of distributed
systems cannot be further improved without serious considerations concerning
memory resources in the design of load sharing policies. Considering
both system heterogeneity and effective usage of memory resources,
we design and evaluate load sharing policies in order to minimize both
CPU idle times and the number of page faults in heterogeneous 
distributed systems. Conducting trace-driven simulations, we show 
that load sharing policies considering both CPU and memory
resources are robust and effective in
heterogeneous systems. We also show that the functionality
and the nature of load sharing policies are quite independent on
several memory demand distributions of workloads.

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