Abstract

This paper presents a hydro-dynamic framework to solving the dynamic load balancing problem on a network of heterogeneous computers. In this approach, each processor is viewed as a liquid cylinder where the cross-sectional area corresponds to the capacity of the processor, the communication links are modeled as liquid channels between the cylinders, the workload is represented as liquid, and the load balancing algorithm describes the flow of the liquid. It is proved that all algorithms under this framework converge geometrically to the state of equilibrium, in which the heights of the liquid columns are the same in all the cylinders. In this way, each processor obtains an amount of workload proportional to its capacity. The parameters that affect the convergence rate of the algorithms are also identified and discussed. 1 Introduction It is useful to explore remote computing power in local area networks (LANs) as processors get more and more powerful and the availability of high spee...

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