A general architecture for load balancing in a distributed-memory environment

The goal of load balancing is to assign to each node a number of tasks proportional to its performance. On distributed-memory machines, it is important to take data dependencies into account when distributing tasks, since they have a big impact on the communication requirements of the distributed application. The authors present a load balancing architecture that can deal with applications with heterogeneous tasks. The idea is to provide a set of load balancers that are effective for different types of homogeneous tasks, and to allow users to combine these load balancers for applications with heterogeneous tasks. This architecture was implemented on the Nectar multicomputer and performance results are presented for several applications with homogeneous and heterogeneous tasks