Load Balancing Strategies for Network-based Cluster System

Cluster system provides attractive scalability in terms of computation power and memory size. With the advances in high speed computer network technology, cluster systems are becoming increasingly competitive compared to expensive parallel machines. In parallel processing program, each task load is difficult to predict before running the program and each task is interdependent each other in many ways. Load imbalancing induces an obstacle to system performance. Most of researches in load balancing were concerned with distributed system but researches in cluster system are few. In cluster system, the dynamic load balancing algorithm which evaluates each processor's load in runtime is purpose that the load of each node are evenly distributed. But, if communication cost or node complexity becomes high, it is not effective method for all nodes to attend load balancing process. In that circumstances, it is good to reduce the number of node which attend to load balancing process. We have modeled cluster systems and proposed marginal dynamic load balancing algorithms suitable for that circumstances.