Adaptive receiver notification for non-dedicated workstation clusters

Efficient communication in a NOW environment can be a challenging task. Depending on the application, the architecture of the nodes and the characteristics of other processes running on the nodes, different communication strategies can be appropriate. In this paper, we evaluate an adaptive scheme which selects between multiple communication strategies depending on the current situation. We focus on strategies for receiver notification under varying load conditions. Previous research has shown that in a non-dedicated environment, spin-block strategies can avoid scheduling anomalies which can cause several orders of magnitude of performance degradation. However, research on these strategies has focused on a fixed spin-delay. Our scheme achieves better performance than static spin-block schemes on workstation clusters with varying load