Improving effective bandwidth of networks on clusters using load balancing for communication-intensive applications

Clusters have emerged as a primary and cost-effective infrastructure for parallel applications, including communication-intensive applications that transfer a large amount of data among nodes of a cluster via interconnection networks. Conventional load balancers have been proven effective in increasing utilization of CPU, memory, and disk I/O resources in a cluster. However, most of the existing load-balancing schemes ignore network resources, leaving open an opportunity for improving effective bandwidth of networks on clusters running parallel applications. For this reason, we propose a communication-aware load balancing technique that is capable of improving performance of communication-intensive applications by increasing effective utilization of networks in cluster environments. Our load-balancing scheme can make use of an application model to quickly and accurately determine the load induced by a variety of parallel applications. Simulation results on executing a wide range of parallel applications on a cluster show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance in slowdown and turn-around time over three existing schemes by up to 206% (with an average of 74%) and 235% (with an average of 82%), respectively.