Load balancing in large networks: a comparative study

The authors compare six well known and two new load balancing strategies on torus and ring topologies of different sizes and workload characteristics. Through simulations on a large transputer network, they show that all strategies behave differently under the workload of process and data migration. The two new algorithms based on the gradient model method are shown to be robust to both kinds of workloads. Thus, these new algorithms are good candidates for distributed operating systems running on large networks, where the workload characteristics can not be determined in advance.<>