FLEXIBLE AND EXTENSIBLE LOAD BALANCING

This paper presents the design philosophy and implementation of the BA LANCE system. BALANCE Is a flexible, network independent and computer architecture independent load balancing system which allows the buildi ng of reusable parallel and distributed applications. By implementing related services as generic servers with their connection endpoints re gistered in BALANCE, the clients can easily access the servers by serv er system calls. To demonstrate the flexibility of BALANCE, several wi dely different applications have been implemented and evaluated, inclu ding system servers, parallel and distributed applications and a sched uling testbed. The use of generic servers to improve system modularity and code reuse is also discussed. (C) 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.