Economic - Based Dynamic Load Distribution

We have designed and implemented a scalable hierarchical system for dynamic load distribution of general divide&conquer applications on large heterogeneous networks of workstations, called Dynasty. Besides its practical goal of exploiting idle processor time we focus the design on eeciency, fairness, reusability, and universality. Our approach is based on economical principles with prices as the basic instrument for regulating ooer and demand, and currency as a form of priority. Each workstation is represented by a local broker that are organized in a hierarchical manner. The number of levels depend on the size and topology of the computer network. If an application forks a sub-task or a task demands migration, the broker system searches the best suited machine the task can aaord and moves it to the target host transparently. The performance of Dynasty has been successfully evaluated by a Finite Element application running on up to 96 workstations.