A Study on the Application of Existing Load Balancing Algorithms for Large, Dynamic, Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

In a large distributed computing environment, like Grid, tasks can be submitted at any host and the random arrival of tasks in such an environment can cause some hosts to be heavily loaded while others are idle or lightly loaded. So, in such environment, load imbalance can potentially be reduced by appropriate transfers of tasks from heavily loaded computers (also known as 'senders') to idle or lightly loaded computers (also known as 'receivers'). Various load balancing algorithms are proposed during the last couple of decades or so. A comparative study on some of them along with their pitfalls in case of huge distributed environment, like Grid, is discussed in this paper.