A new model of multi-installment divisible loads processing in systems with limited memory

Abstract

In this paper we study multi-installment divisible load processing in a heterogeneous distributed system with limited memory. Divisible load model applies to computations which can be arbitrarily divided into parts and performed independently in parallel. The initial waiting for the load may be shortened by sending many small chunks of load instead of one huge. The load chunk sizes must be adjusted to the speeds of communication, computation, and memory sizes, such that the whole processing time is as short as possible. We propose a new realistic model of memory management, and formulate it as mixed quadratic programming problem which is solved by branch and bound algorithm. Since this problem is computationally hard we propose heuristics, and analyze their performance in a series of computational experiments. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.