On Optimum Multi-installment Divisible Load Processing in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

• Published in: Euro-Par 2005 Parallel Processing pp. 231 - 240
• Main Authors: Drozdowski, Maciej, Lawenda, Marcin
• Format: Book Chapter Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2005; Springer
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; divisible load; Exact sciences and technology; heterogeneous systems; multi-installment processing; optimization algorithms; scheduling and load balancing; Software; Distributed load; Initialization; High performance; Parallel algorithm; Branch and bound method; Scheduling; Lot sizing; Distributed system; Distributed computing; Waiting time; Gear; Optimization; Optimum; Genetic algorithm; Parallel computation
• ISBN: 3540287000; 9783540287001
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/11549468_28

In this paper we study multi-installment divisible load processing in heterogeneous distributed systems. Divisible loads are computations which can be divided into parts of arbitrary sizes, and these parts can be processed independently in parallel. In order to reduce the waiting time during the parallel computation initialization phase, load is sent to the processors in multiple small installments. In a heterogeneous system the sizes of the installments should be adjusted to the communication, and computation capabilities of the processors. We propose two algorithms that gear the load chunk sizes to different communication and computation speeds. The first one is an optimization branch and bound algorithm. The second algorithm is based on genetic search. The running times of both methods and the quality of the genetic algorithm solutions are compared. Then, we use these algorithms to analyze features of the scheduling problem solutions.