Load Balancing in Distributed Applications Based on Extremal Optimization

The paper shows how to use Extremal Optimization in load balancing of distributed applications executed in clusters of multicore processors interconnected by a message passing network. Composed of iterative optimization phases which improve program task placement on processors, the proposed load balancing method discovers dynamically the candidates for migration with the use of an Extremal Optimization algorithm and a special quality model which takes into account the computation and communication parameters of the constituent parallel tasks. Assessed by experiments with simulated load balancing of distributed program graphs, a comparison of the proposed Extremal Optimization approach against a deterministic approach based on a similar load balancing theoretical model is provided.