An Experimental Study of Workload Indices for Non-dedicated, Heterogeneous Systems.

A primary objective of computing systems is the efficient utilization of available resources. This has become increasingly important with the advent of large, low-cost distributed systems. Effective resource management of these types of systems requires strategies for the equitable distribution or scheduling of processes among the multiple processors available. Regardless of the type of scheduling being considered (static, dynamic, real-time), an essential element of the scheduling policy is the measurement of load. To efficiently manage load distribution, an accurate workload metric or load index is necessary. In this paper, we empirically investigate the usefulness of various popular load indices, and include one which we propose. We study the effect that the choice of load index has on the performance of load balancing algorithms executed on non-dedicated and heterogeneous distributed systems. Keywords: load balancing, distributed systems, distributed scheduling, workload indices. 1...