Performance impact of scheduling discipline on adaptive load sharing in homogeneous distributed systems

Load sharing is a technique to improve the performance of distributed systems by distributing the system workload from heavily loaded nodes, where service is poor, to lightly loaded nodes in the system. Previous studies have considered two adaptive load sharing policies: sender-initiated and receiver-initiated. In the sender-initiated policy, a heavily loaded node attempts to transfer work to a lightly loaded node and in the receiver-initiated policy a lightly loaded node attempts to get work from a heavily loaded node. Almost all the previous studies assumed the first-come/first-served node scheduling policy; furthermore, analysis and simulations in these studies have been done under the assumption that the job service times are exponentially distributed and the job arrivals form a Poisson process (i.e., job inter-arrival times are exponentially distributed). The goal of this paper is to fill the void in the existing literature. We study the impact of these assumptions on the performance of the sender-initiated and receiver initiated policies. We consider three node scheduling policies-first-come/first-served (FCFS), shortest job first (SJF), and round robin (RR) policies. Furthermore, we also look at the impact of variance in the inter-arrival times and in the job service times. Our results show that: (i) When non-preemptive node scheduling policies (FCFS and SJF) are used, the receiver-initiated policy is (substantially) more sensitive to variance in inter-arrival times than the sender-initiated policies and the sender-initiated policies are relatively more sensitive to the variance in job service times; (ii) When the preemptive node scheduling policy (RR) is used, the sender-initiated policy provides a better performance than the receiver-initiated policy.