The development of an environment to study load balancing algorithms, process migration and load data collection
Weiping Zhu · UNSWorks (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) · 2022
Load balancing has been suggested to fulfill the resources of a distributed system. However, load balancing studies in the past mainly fell into simulation studies. Due to the simplified model adopted in the simulation studies, the results obtained require to be proved in a real system. Moreover, the issues of designing and implementing a load balancing facility for a distributed operating system have not been emphasized by researchers. This thesis systematically studies the design issues of a load balancing facility and the relationship between the load balancing facility and the other parts of a distributed operating system. Based on this study, this thesis presents the design and implementation of a load balancing facility in a distributed operating system, called RHODOS. This facility has been designed as a test bed to evaluate different load balancing algorithms in a real system. The test bed consists of three components: load balancing servers, process migration and workload collection. The relations and the locations of these components in RHODOS have been carefully studied in order to have the maximum flexibility and to limit the overhead caused by passing messages and context switches. A number of techniques developed in this implementation are offered, which enhance the cooperation between different parts of the operating system. In addition, some new load balancing algorithms are put forward in this thesis. The simulation results are also presented.