A reusable load balancer for parallel search problems

doi:10.1016/0165-6074(93)90145-B

Microprocessing and Microprogramming

Volume 38, Issues 1–5, September 1993, Pages 205-212

Microprocessing and ...

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a reusable load balancer for parallelsearch problems. Parallel search problems are a significant research topic in the parallel processing area: these applications expose irregularities that require dynamic load balancing techniques.

Software for dynamic load balancing should be reusable. Our load balancer can be developed independently from the application -and thus be replaced and reused- as it does not directly interact with the application itself. Our prototype implementation runs on a transputer system; we used different load balancing strategies: sender-initiated, receiver-initiated and symmetrically-initiated. The modularity of our load balancer is illustrated by the fact that we could easily replace the load balancer by different alternatives and compare the performance results.

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Cited by (2)

A prediction-based adaptive location policy for distributed load balancing
1996, Journal of Systems Architecture
The location policy in distributed load balancing is to locate the destination nodes to or from which tasks will be transferred. An efficient location policy is required to achieve high performance on distributed load balancing. In this paper, we propose a new distributed adaptive location policy based on predictable state knowledge. The predictable state knowledge in each node is composed of the system state information collected at run time and the predefined static information that is a priority order of each node for transferring tasks. The proposed scheme systematically maintains the preditable state knowledge in each node by using an efficient data structure and a rule for collecting state information with low overheads. When the state of a node becomes heavily-loaded, the proposed scheme predicts both heavily-loaded nodes and lightly-loaded nodes by exploiting predictable state knowledge and then finds a good lightly-loaded node that minimizes useless polling and maximizes even load distribution. An analytic model is developed to compare the presented scheme with other well known schemes. The validity of the model is checked with an event-driven simulation, and it is shown that the presented scheme exhibits a significant performance improvement over other schemes, especially at high system loads. Also, the presented scheme is shown to significantly improve polling hit ratio and to avoid system instability.
A reflective invocation scheme to realise advanced object management
1994, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

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Microprocessing and Microprogramming

A reusable load balancer for parallel search problems

Abstract

A Deadlock Detection Tool for Occam

Implementation of a parallel branch-and-bound algorithm for the travelling salesman problem

A parallel Time/Hardware Trade off for the Knapsack Problem

IEEE Transactions on Computers

A Highly parallel Chess Program

A prediction-based adaptive location policy for distributed load balancing

A reflective invocation scheme to realise advanced object management