LoadBuilder: a tool for generating and modeling workloads in distributed workstation environments

This report presents LoadBuilder, a distributed environment designed to provide a portable way of empirically studying the effects of various kinds of workloads in local area networks of heterogeneous workstations. This tool is especially intended to build distributed experimentations including composite workload setting, statistics collecting and performance evaluations. The statistical analysis of the experimental results will help the dynamic load balancing designer to select the most meaningful indicators out of the plethora available on workstations, to establish behavior models of the workstations, to exhibit critical workload thresholds and finally, to establish his own set of meaningful workload indicators. In the following, we first describe the architecture of the environment. Then, we present and discuss the algorithms used to build (a) synthetic workloads, (b) statistics collectors and (c) measurement procedures. Key-words: Performance evaluation, Workload characterization, Distributed computing, Networks, Experimental design