Information policies for load balancing on heterogeneous systems

Dynamic load balancing decisions on cluster or grid computing systems are always based on some kind of knowledge about the system nodes state. Therefore, to balance the computational workload among the different system nodes, a local or global information exchange is needed. The information policy determines how and when this exchange is performed. This paper discusses and compares the three traditional information policies: periodic, on demand and event-driven, in order to conclude if there is a better approach for the current heterogeneous systems. All the comparisons are performed evaluating a new metric, called information efficiency, defined in this paper to quantify the benefits obtained with an information policy considering the network traffic generated by the information exchange and its effectiveness in the information updating.