Methodical Analysis of Adaptive Load Sharing Algorithms

This paper presents a method for qualitative and quantitative analysis of load sharing algorithms, using a number of well known examples as illustration. Algorithm design choices are considered with respect to the main activities of information dissemination and allocation decision making. We argue that nodes must be capable of making local decisions, and for this efficient state dissemination techniques are necessary. Activities related to remote execution should be bounded and restricted to a small proportion of the activity in the system. The quantitative analysis provides both performance and efficiency measures, including consideration of the load and delay characteristics of the environment. To assess stability, which is also a precondition for scalability,we introduce and measure load sharing hit-ratio, the ratio of remote execution requests concluded successfully. Using our analysis method, we are able to suggest improvements to some published algorithms.