Diffusive load-balancing policies for dynamic applications

Massively parallel architectures require decentralized and scalable system policies. The paper presents and evaluates a set of local dynamic load balancing strategies inspired by diffusion and characterized by different scopes of locality: the goal is to compare their performance depending on the application dynamicity. The paper shows that only slowly dynamic applications can take advantage of the diffusion policies with larger scope, because they are likely to base their decisions on non obsolete information only for limited load variations. Highly dynamic applications should preferably employ load balancing policies with a very limited scope, due to their promptness to react to load changes.