Migration impact on load balancing-an experience on Amoeba

Abstract

Load balancing has been extensively studied by simulation and positive results were acheived in most of the research. With the increasing availability of distributed systems, a few experiments have been carried out on different systems. These experimental studies either depend on task initiation or task initiation plus task migration. We present the results of a 0 study of load balancing using a centralized policy to manage the load on a set of processors; it was carried out on an Amoeba system which consists of a set of 386s, linked by 10 Mbps Ethernet. The results on one hand indicate the necessity of a load balancing facility for a distributed system. On the other hand the results question the impact of using process migration to increase system performance under the configuration used in our experiments.