Load management with mobile agents

High-performance clusters are of increasing interest. In general, they consist of several heterogeneous workstations and/or PCs connected via a fast network. A large problem in this area is the efficient utilization of all available resources; hence, automated load management systems are applied. Due to the heterogeneous hardware, most of the standard load-balancing tools cannot be used because they support only homogeneous machines. In this paper, the FLASH (Flexible Agent System for Heterogeneous Clusters) system is presented, which uses a mobile agent approach. Mobile agents have the capability of travelling through a heterogeneous cluster and fulfilling jobs on the visited computation nodes. FLASH offers application programmers a framework for the creation of distributed load-balanced applications. Currently, the realization is based on Java and the agent system Voyager.