A dynamic load balancing strategy with adaptive threshold based approach

Abstract

To meet the objective of minimizing the job execution time, parallel computing has to deal with a lot of issues which crop up while working with parallel code. These issues can result in bottleneck and restrict the behavior of parallel program in attaining an aforesaid speedup as suggested by Amdahl Gene. The most problematic issue that crops up is the distribution of workload in both the categories of parallel system viz. homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. This situation demands an effective load balancing strategy to be in place in order to ensure a uniform distribution of load across the board. The scheduling `m' jobs to `n' resources with the objective to optimize the QoS parameters while balancing the load has been proven to be NP-hard problem. Therefore, a heuristic approach can be used to design an effective load balancing strategy. In this paper, a centralized dynamic load balancing strategy using adaptive thresholds has been proposed for a parallel system consisting of multiprocessors. The scheduler continuously monitors the load on the system and takes corrective measures as the load changes. The threshold values considered are adaptive in nature and are readjusted to suite the changing load on the system. Therefore, the scheduler always ensures a uniform distribution of the load on the processing elements with dynamic load environment.