A Reasonable Approach for Defining Load Index in Parallel Computing

Load balancing plays a key role in workload scheduling policies which count in the performance improvement of parallel applications. A critical problem of load balancing is to make a reasonable definition of load index. Unfortunately, few studies provided enough scientific justifications for the choice of load indices. In this paper, a reasonable approach for defining a load index based on factor analysis theory is introduced, which is helpful to reasonable designs of workload scheduling algorithms. An example testing on an accounting log of the CM-5 parallel machine is presented to show the usage of this method.