Carleton University
Technical Report TR-97-14
July 1997
TR-97-14: A Comparative Study of Load Sharing on Networks of Workstations
Anatol Piotrowski & Sivarama P. Dandamudi
Abstract
Networks of workstations (NOWs) can be used for parallel processing by using public domain software like PVM. There are significant differences between a real parallel system and a NOW-based system. As a result, load sharing on a NOW can be different from that on a parallel machine. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that influence the performance of load sharing algorithms on NOWs. To gain this understanding, we study performance of a matrix multiplication application on a network of heterogeneous workstations that uses the PVM. We report performance of five load sharing algorithms that use fixed, variable, and adaptive task granularity.