PARAMETRIC ANALYSIS OF STATIC LOAD BALANCING OF MULTICLASS JOBS IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER-SYSTEM

The effects of changing system parameters on job scheduling policies are studied for load balancing of multiclass jobs in a distributed computer system that consists of heterogeneous host computers connected by a single-channel communications network. A job scheduling policy decides which host should process the arriving jobs. We consider two job scheduling policies. The one is the overall optimal policy whereby jobs are scheduled so as to minimize the overall mean job response time. Tantawi and Towsley obtained the algorithm that gives the solution of the policy in the single class job environment and Kim and Kameda extended it to the multiple job class environment. The other is the individually optimal policy whereby jobs are scheduled so that every job may feel that its own expected response time is minimized. We can consider three important system parameters in a distributed computer system: the communication time of the network, the processing capacity of each node, and the job arrival rate of each node. We examine the effects of these three parameters on the two load balancing policies by numerical experiment.