Usefulness of adaptive load sharing for parallel processing on networks of workstations

Abstract

Networks of workstations (NOWs) can be used for parallel processing by using public domain software like PVM. However, NOW-based parallel processing suffers from node heterogeneity, background load variations, and high-latency, low-bandwidth communication network. Previous studies on load sharing in NOW-based systems have indicated that, for applications using the work-pile model, a simple load sharing scheme in which the master process gives a fixed amount of work to the slave processes performs as well as any other, more complex schemes. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive load sharing scheme and evaluate its performance using a Pentium-based NOW machine. The communication network used in the system consists of the standard 10 Mbps Ethernet and the 100 Mbps fast Ethernet. We use both these networks to study their impact on the performance of our new policy. The results presented here indicate that the new policy is useful for computation-intensive applications. Copyright  1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.