A Novel Load Balancing Algorithm for Computational Grid

The Grid computing environment is a cooperation of distributed computer systems where user jobs can be executed on either local or remote computer. Many problems exist in grid environment. Not only the computational nodes are heterogeneous but also the underlying networks connecting them are heterogeneous. The network bandwidth varies and the network topology among resources is also not fixed. Thus with this multitude of heterogeneous resources, a proper scheduling and efficient load balancing across the Grid is required for improving performance of the system. The load balancing is done by migrating jobs to the buddy processors, a set of processors to which a processor is directly connected. An algorithm, Load Balancing on Arrival (LBA) is proposed for small-scale (intraGrid) systems. It is efficient in minimizing the response time for small-scale grid environment. When a job arrives LBA computes system parameters and expected finish time on buddy processors and the job is migrated immediately. This algorithm estimates system parameters such as job arrival rate, CPU processing rate and load on each processor to make migration decision. This algorithm also considers job transfer cost, resource heterogeneity and network heterogeneity while making migration decision.