Load balancing in large networks: a comparative study

In this paper we compare six well known and two new load balancing strategies on torus and ring topologies of diierent sizes and workload characteristics. Through simulations on a large transputer network, we show that all strategies behave diierently under the workload of process and data migration. The two new algorithms based on the gradient model method are shown to be robust to both kinds of workloads. Thus, these new algorithms are good candidates for distributed operating systems running on large networks, where the workload characteristics can not be determined in advance.