BBCLB: A Bulletin-Board based Cooperative Load Balance Strategy for Service Grid

Although many efforts have been put on the load balance in network and job scheduling systems, most of them, however, can not be applied in the service grid environment directly since they are often designed for a homogeneous system with limited scalability. It is still a challenge problem to balance the load among service grid nodes which are often highly dynamic, heterogeneous and linked by wide-area network. In this paper, we present a load balance strategy using several bulletin-boards as load intermediates among grid nodes. A modified thresholds based load transfer algorithm has been applied with a non-preemptive selection policy. Based on the strategy above, a load balance system is realized in CROWN, a service oriented grid middleware, and deployed in the CROWN testbed. The performance evaluations have shown that our strategy can effectively balance the load of service invocation, and improve the system throughput.