On the stability of a distributed dynamic load balancing algorithm

Abstract

We present a new fully distributed dynamic load balancing algorithm called DASUD (Diffusion Algorithm Searching Unbalanced Domains). Since DASUD is iterative and runs in an asynchronous way, a mathematical model that describes DASUD behaviour has been proposed and has been used to prove DASUD's convergence. DASUD has been evaluated by comparison with another well known strategy from the literature, namely, the SID (Sender Initiated Diffusion) algorithm. The comparison was carried out by considering a large set of load distributions which were applied to ring, torus and hypercube topologies, and the number of processors ranged from 8 to 128. From these experiments we have observed that DASUD outperforms the SID strategy as it provides the best trade-off between the global balance degree obtained at the final state and the number of iterations required to reach such a state.