|
Clusters
have emerged as a primary and cost-effective infrastructure for parallel
applications, including communication-intensive applications that
transfer a large amount of data among nodes of a cluster via
interconnection networks. Conventional load balancers have been proven
effective in increasing utilization of CPU, memory, and disk I/O
resources in a cluster. However, most of the existing load-balancing
schemes ignore network resources, leaving open an opportunity for
improving effective bandwidth of networks on clusters running parallel
applications. For this reason, we propose a communication-aware load
balancing technique that is capable of improving performance of
communication-intensive applications by increasing effective utilization
of networks in cluster environments. Our load-balancing scheme can make
use of an application model to quickly and accurately determine the load
induced by a variety of parallel applications. Simulation results on
executing a wide range of parallel
applications on a cluster show that the proposed scheme can
significantly improve the performance in slowdown and turn-around time
over three existing schemes by up to 206% (with an average of 74%) and
235% (with an average of 82%), respectively.
|