Competitive Equilibrium Approach for Load Balancing a Computational Grid with Communication Delays

Computational grids interconnect hundreds of heterogeneous computing resources from geographically remote sites, designed to meet the large demands of many users from scientific and business domains. A job initiated at one site can be executed by any of the computing resources. Therefore, response time of a job includes processing delay at the site of execution and communication delay for transferring the job from the site of initiation to the site of execution. Load balancing is allocation of jobs to available resources so as to optimize a given objective function. The objective can be achieving a system optimal solution, which tries to minimize the mean response time of all users or an individual optimal solution which tries to minimize each user’s response time. Previous works on load balancing either considered only system optimal objective or individual optimal objective. This paper introduces competitive equilibrium solution, a pricing mechanism for load balancing that independently and simultaneously achieves both system optimal objective and individual optimal objective.