A decentralized algorithm for dynamic load balancing with file transfer
Abstract This article presents an implementation and performance evaluation of load balancing in a locally distributed system. The decentralized algorithm proposed here uses both process and file transfer. The load balancing algorithm consists of three routines. The local process queue routine decides whether to execute a user process immediately or to append the user job to the local process queue. The local monitor routine does the process and file transfer. The distributed monitor on each host collects and updates the information about the state of the local host and broadcasts this information to all the remote hosts. It is proven analytically that the decentralized algorithm can balance the system load. A number of experiments executed in the distributed system under various loading conditions and for different job submission configurations show the applications of the algorithm. The article introduces the concept of the migratable factor that allows for performance improvement through process and file transfer. The results of the experiments show that the decentralized algorithm with file transfer increases system performance through load balancing for various workloads.