A trace-driven simulation study of dynamic load balancing

A trace-driven simulation study of dynamic load balancing in homogeneous distributed systems supporting broadcasting is presented. Information about job CPU and input/output (I/O) demands collected from production systems is used as input to a simulation model that includes a representative CPU scheduling policy and considers the message exchange and job transfer cost explicitly. Seven load-balancing algorithms are simulated and their performances compared. Load balancing is capable of significantly reducing the mean and standard deviation of job response times, especially under heavy load, and for jobs with high resource demands. Algorithms based on periodic or nonperiodic 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. With initial job placements only, source initiative algorithms were found to perform better than server initiative algorithms. The performances of all hosts, even those originally with light loads, are generally improved by load balancing.<>