Sharing jobs among independently owned processors

In a network of independently owned processors (e.g. workstations), load-balancing schemes cannot consider the whole network as one unit and thus try to optimize the overall performance. Instead, they have to consider the needs of the resource owners. For this type of environment, load sharing is a more appropriate goal. An approach is proposed in which each machine in the network determines the amount of sharing it is willing to do. The scheme, called High-Low makes sure that the service provided to local jobs of a lightly doped node does not deteriorate by more than a predefined amount. It simultaneously helps improve the service at heavily loaded nodes. It is shown empirically that load sharing in a network of workstations can be effective even with a simple-minded allocation of jobs