Dynamic computation scheduling for load balancing in home-based software DSMs

Load balancing is a critical issue for achieving good performance in parallel and distributed systems. However, this issue is neglected in the research area of software DSMs in the past decade. In this paper, we present and evaluate a dynamic computation scheduling scheme for load balancing of iterative applications in software DSM system. The experiment platform is a home based DSM system named JIAJIA. Preliminary results show that this load balancing scheme is efficient and can be used in other software DSM systems. Compared with simple chunk self scheduling scheme which works well for single iteration applications, the system performance is improved by about 30% with the affinity-based self scheduling proposed in this paper.