Dynamic Load Balancing Algorithm using Execution Time Prediction on Cluster Systems

In recent years, an increasing amount of computer network research has focused on the problem of cluster system in order to achieve higher performance and lower cost. The load unbalance is the major defect that reduces performance of a cluster system that uses parallel program in a form of SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data). Also, the load unbalance is a problem of MPP (Massive Parallel Processors), and distributed system. The cluster system is a loosely-coupled distributed system, therefore, it has higher communication overhead than MPP. Dynamic load balancing can solve the load unbalance problem of cluster system and reduce its communication cost. The cluster systems considered in this paper consist of P heterogeneous nodes connected by a switch-based network. The master node can predict the average execution time of tasks for each slave node based on the information from the corresponding slave node. Then, the master node redistributes remaining tasks to each node considering the predicted execution time and the communication overhead for task migration. The proposed dynamic load balancing uses execution time prediction to optimize the task redistribution. The various performance factors such as node number, task number, and communication cost are considered to improve the performance of cluster system. From the simulation results, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic load balancing algorithm.