History, an Intelligent Load Sharing Filter

Load sharing can improve performance in distributed systems by transferring work from heavily loaded nodes to lightly loaded nodes. We propose a lter component to be included in a load sharing algorithm to detect short-lived jobs not worth considering for remote execution. One lter, called History, detects short-lived jobs by using job names and statistics based on previous executions. Job traces were collected from diskless workstations connected by a local area network and supported by a distributed le system. Trace driven simulation was then used to evaluate History with respect to other lters. Two load sharing algorithms showed signiicant improvement of the mean job response ratio when the History lter was added.