Stability of Load Sharing in a Distributed Computer System
Mahboob Ashraf · Summit (Simon Fraser University) · 1987
Load sharing attempts to improve the performance of a distributed system by making global scheduling decisions in a decentralized, adaptive way.Results from analytical and simulation studies indicate that load sharing policies of modest complexities are capable of achieving significant performance improvements.Very few of these studies, however, treat stability issues for distributed load sharing policies.In this thesis, the stability issues of three representative simple policies are studied.The performance of these policies under heavy and fluctuating load is evaluated with respect to specific stability issues and analyzed in terms of the response time.The dependence of the performance on the environment in which the policies are implemented and on the nature of interprocess communication is discussed.iii 'Task is the initial articulation of the work to be done, that is, the run-time description given to the operating system to invoke the execution of a particular piece of code.We shall also use two other terms: process which is the program object code plus the operating system run-time process control data structures which maintain and execute the object code; and job which is the entire work cycle, from task invocation through process execution.' P a n g & Morris 851