Effective load balancing in a distributed object-support operating system

An important mechanism in any distributed object-based system is a means of managing load imbalances. This paper introduces the Bellerophon load balancer. The approach described provides dynamic system-level balancing in a topology independent fashion that is appropriate for avoiding gross imbalances of load. A number of novel techniques are combined with a heuristic to form a hybrid local garbage detector and load balancer. Multiple load measures are regularly compared, by each node with a dynamically varying subset of the others; and clumps of objects, selected to avoid breaking cycles, are transferred to improve the load balancing.<
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