BALANCE-a flexible parallel load balancing system for heterogeneous computing systems and networks

The design philosophy and implementation of the BALANCE system is described. BALANCE is a flexible, network independent and computer architecture independent load balancing system which is designed to support a wide range of software, including parallel and distributed applications as well as schedulers. The generic server and server system call structures are used as bases to enhance flexibility and to build complex services. BALANCE is not tied to a particular scheduling algorithm, rather the users are allowed to build their own schedulers. To demonstrate the flexibility and power of BALANCE, a set of system services and scheduling algorithms has been implemented and evaluated. A new delay scheduling algorithm which postpones the execution of jobs in high load situation is proposed. It is shown that this algorithm effectively improves system throughput and yet bounds the response times for the console commands.