Adaptive and Dynamic Load Balancing Methodologies For Distributed Environment: A Review

Distributed network computing environments have become a cost effective and popular choice to achieve high performance and to solve large scale computation problems. Unlike past supercomputers, a cluster or grid or peer-to-peer (P2P) system can be used as multipurpose computing platform to run diverse high performance parallel applications. Cluster computing environment consist of Personal Computers (PCs) that are interconnected using high speed networks and are located at same location where as grid computing involves coupled and coordinated use of geographically distributed resources for purposes such as large scale computation and distributed data analysis. Peer-To-Peer is composed of participants that make a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage, and network bandwidth) available directly to their peers without intermediary network hosts or servers. Load Balancing (LB) in a distributed system is a process of sharing computational resources by transparently distributing system workload. A workstation user may not use the machine all the time, but may require more than it while working actively. Some resources may be heavily loaded, while other remains idle. Performance enhancement is one of the most important issues in distributed system. The performance of the system can often be improved to an acceptable level simply by distributing the load among the resources.