A survey of load sharing in networks of workstations
Guillaume Bernard, Dawson Steve, Michel Simatic · Distributed Systems Engineering · 1993
Presents a survey of existing policies and mechanisms for load sharing in loosely-coupled distributed computing systems, where user machines are personal workstations interconnected by a local area network. The authors are interested only in centralized operating systems providing mechanisms for remote process communication. They define load sharing, load balancing, non-pre-emptive migration and pre-emptive migration, and discuss the goals of load sharing and load balancing strategies related to process scheduling. They argue against the usefulness of load balancing strategies in the context of networks of workstations. A load sharing algorithm is composed of three parts, namely, a location policy, an information policy and a transfer policy. The authors review the different location policies, information policies and transfer policies that have been proposed in the literature.