A simulation study of two distributed task allocation procedures

The authors concentrate on the simulation study of two distributed task allocation procedures: the load balancing and the LOCO procedure. The first is widely used in general-purpose processing. The second was recently introduced and analyzed in the processing environment corresponding to the complex multitask jobs typical of some supercomputing and artificial-intelligence-oriented systems. Both procedures are simulated and compared in realistic situations, where both processing resources and interconnection network may represent the system bottleneck. Both were tested using carrier-sense multiple-access communications protocols. The CSMA/CD protocol performed better than TDMA with load balancing, but no difference was found with the LOCO procedure. For a large number of special-purpose processing resources and a large number of jobs in the system, LOCO produced better results than load balancing.