A distributed load balancing algorithm for heterogeneous parallel computing systems

Heterogeneous parallel computing systems built up by closely connected networks of workstations or personal computers are a cheap alternative to dedicated parallel supercomputer systems. As these systems are widely available in academic and industrial environments it is becoming increasingly popular to use these resources to solve time consuming calculations. In this paper, the question of load balancing on heterogeneous parallel computing systems is addressed. The paper presents a general methodology to transform existing load balancing methods that are used for load balancing on homogeneous parallel computing systems into methods, which tate into account the special characteristics of heterogeneous systems. The here presented strategy is applied to a load balancing algorithm, which has been used for distributed branch & bound applications on homogeneous parallel computing systems. Experiments conducted on a 16-node ATM cluster show that the speedup of the parallel branch & bound application can be increased considerably by the use of a transformed algorithm.