Profile-Based Load Balancing for Heterogeneous Clusters

Cluster computing is becoming increasingly popular for providing cost-effective and affordable parallel computing for day-to-day computational needs [2, 11, 16]. Such environments consist of clusters of workstations connected by Local Area Networks (LANs). The possibility of the incremental expansion of clusters by incorporating new generations of computing nodes and networking technologies is another factor contributing to the popularity of cluster computing. However, this incremental expansion leads to heterogeneity in speed and communication capability of workstations, systems with different memory and cache organization, coexistence of multiple network architectures, and availability of alternative communication protocols. This is forcing the cluster computing environments to be redefined as heterogeneous clusters.