Performance Studies Of Dynamic Load Balancing In Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are often characterized by uneven loads on hosts and other resources. In this thesis, the problems concerning dynamic load balancing in loosely-coupled distributed systems are studied using trace-driven simulation, implementation, and measurement. Information about job CPU and I/O demands is collected from three production systems and used as input to a simulator that includes a representative CPU scheduling policy and considers the message exchange and job transfer costs explicitly. A prototype load balancer is implemented in the Berkeley UNIX and Sun/UNIX environments, and the results of a large number of measurement experiments performed on six workstations are presented.