Sensitivity Evaluation of Dynamic Load Sharing in Distributed Systems

• Authors: Sivarama P. Dandamudi
• Venue: IEEE Concurrency
• Year: 1998

Load sharing improves performance of distributed systems by distributing load from heavily-loaded nodes to lightly-loaded nodes in the system. We consider two basic dynamic 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. In most previous studies, the first-come/first-served node scheduling policy has been used. In addition, analysis and simulations in these studies have been done under the assumption that service times and inter-arrival times of jobs are exponentially distributed. The behaviour of these policies is not clear when these assumptions are relaxed. We report the sensitivity of the performance of the sender-initiated and receiver-initiated policies to node scheduling policy, variance in service times, and variance in inter-arrival times. Our objective is to provide an intuitive understanding of the behaviour of these policies that transcends specific system and workload models and parameter values used. Index Terms: Dynamic load sharing, Distributed systems, Heterogeneous distributed systems, Performance evaluation, Process scheduling.