Load Balancing in Distributed Systems

In Computer world Server load balancing is the process of distributing service requests across a group of servers. Users of one workstation are not hindered by the CPU intensive applications run on a different workstation. However, when a large number of machines in the network are idle, the efficiency of computation is decreased. The sharing of computing resources in a distributed system is a more complex matter than in an equivalent centralized system, due to the fragmentation of resources over a set of autonomous and often physically separate hosts. The effect of this fragmentation is reduced by evenly distributing the workload of the system over all the hosts, resulting in more effective use of the system resources, and a corresponding reduction in the average response time of processes. Load balancing promises to alleviate this problem by sharing the workload on heavily loaded workstations with lightly loaded workstations. A threshold can be established so that only a limited number of processes are transferred to the lightly loaded sites, so that the load at those sites does not inhibit local execution of processes. We present a solution for the Load Balancing Problem by designing an algorithm calculates loads and chooses modules to be relocated. The algorithm is then compared with other well-known load balancing algorithms.