BALANCE - A Flexible Parallel Load Balancing System for Heterogeneous Computing Systems and Networks

The design philosophy and implementation of the BALANCE system is described in this paper. The BALANCE system is a exible, computer architecture independent and network independent load balancing system which is designed to support a wide range of software, including parallel and distributed applications as well as schedulers. The generic server and server system call structures are used as bases to enhance exibility and to build complex services. The BALANCE system is not tied to a particular scheduling algorithm, rather the users are allowed to build their own schedulers. To demonstrate the exibility and power of the BALANCE system, a set of system services and scheduling algorithms have been implemented and evaluated. A new delay scheduling algorithm which postpones the execution of jobs in high load situation is proposed. It is shown that this algorithm e ectively improves system throughput while maintaining good response times for the console jobs.