THEORETICAL-ANALYSIS OF THE HETEROGENEOUS DYNAMIC LOAD-BALANCING PROBLEM USING A HYDRODYNAMIC APPROACH

This paper presents a hydrodynamic framework for solving the dynamic l oad-balancing problem on a network of heterogeneous computers. In this approach, each processor is viewed as a liquid cylinder where the cro ss-sectional area corresponds to the capacity of the processor, the co mmunication links are modeled as liquid channels between the cylinders , the workload is represented as liquid, and the load-balancing algori thm describes the flow of the liquid. It is proven that all algorithms under this framework converge geometrically to the state of equilibri um, in which the heights of the liquid columns are the same in all the cylinders, In this way, each processor obtains an amount of workload proportional to its capacity, The parameters that affect the convergen ce rates of the algorithms are also identified and discussed. (C) 1997 Academic Press.