A Hierarchical Approach to Load Balancing in Distributed Systems

Abstract

In this paper we present a hierarchical algo- rithm for performing dynamic load balancing in a distri- buted system The processors in the system are viewed as being in a lightly loaded, heavily loaded, or normally loaded state The goal of the algorithm is to keep all nodes normally loaded by migrating processes from heavily loaded nodes to lightly loaded nodes In addi- tion, the load balancing must involve low communica- tion overhead and respond quickly to load imbalance in the system The system is partitioned into disjoint groups of processors First intra-partition process migra- tion is performed to achieve an acceptable load distribu- tion If this is not sufficient, inter-partition load balanc- ing is carried out