A dynamic load-balancing policy with a central job dispatcher (LBC)

Abstract

A dynamic load-balancing policy is proposed with a central job dispatcher called the LBC policy for distributed systems. The design of this policy is motivated by the operation of a single-queue multiserver queuing system, and the average job response time is the same as that of a single-queue multiserver system, which is the best achievable performance when the communication delay is reduced to zero. Hence, near-minimum average job response time is expected for distributed systems with high-speed communication subnets. The performance is studied for systems with nonnegligible job transfer delays in the following three aspects: average job response time, overhead due to information exchanges, and sensitivity to heterogeneous load.