Diffusion Schemes for Load Balancing on Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Several different diffusion schemes have previously been developed for load balancing on homogeneous processor networks. We generalize existing schemes, in order to deal with heterogeneous networks.

Generalized schemes may operate efficiently on networks where each processor can have arbitrary computing power, i.e., the load will be balanced proportionally to these powers. The balancing flow that is calculated by schemes for homogeneous networks is minimal with regard to the l ₂ -norm and we prove this to hold true for generalized schemes, too. We demonstrate the usability of generalized schemes by a number of experiments on several heterogeneous networks.