Carleton University
Technical Report TR-98-03
January 1998
TR-98-03: Performance Comparison of Adaptive and Hierarchical Load Sharing in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
Abstract
State information in dynamic load sharing policies can be maintained in one of two basic ways: distributed or centralized. Two principal types of distributed policies are the sender-initiated and receiver-initiated policies. In the centralized scheme, a central coordinator node is responsible for collecting system state information. Distributed policies do not perform as well as the centralized policy. Distributed policies, however, are scalable whereas the centralized policy can cause bottleneck and fault-tolerance problems for large systems. An adaptive distribu- ted policy has been proposed that dynamically switches between sender-initiated and receiver-initiated policies depending on system state. A global hierarchical policy has been proposed to minimize the drawbacks associated with the distributed and centralized policies while retaining their advantages. This paper provides a performance comparison of these policies in hetero- geneous distributed systems.