Resource-Aware Load Balancing of Parallel Applications

Abstract

The problem of load balancing parallel applications is particularly challenging on computational grids, since the characteristics of both the application and the platform must be taken into account. This chapter reviews the wide range of solutions that have been proposed. It considers tightly coupled parallel applications that can be described by an undirected graph representing concurrent execution of tasks and communication of tasks, executing on computational grids with static and dynamic network and processor performance. While a rich set of solution techniques have been proposed, there has not been of yet any performance comparisons between them. Such comparisons will require parallel benchmarks and computational grid emulators and simulators.