Dynamic Load Balancing for I/O-Intensive Tasks on Heterogeneous Clusters

1 Since I/O-intensive tasks running on a heterogeneous cluster need a highly effective usage of global I/O resources, previous CPUor memory-centric load balancing schemes suffer significant performance drop under I/O-intensive workload due to the imbalance of I/O load. To solve this problem, we develop two I/O-aware load-balancing schemes, which consider system heterogeneity and migrate more I/O-intensive tasks from a node with high I/O utilization to those with low I/O utilization. If the workload is memory-intensive in nature, the new method applies a memory-based load balancing policy to assign the tasks. Likewise, when the workload becomes CPU-intensive, our scheme leverages a CPU-based policy as an efficient means to balance the system load. In doing so, the proposed approach maintains the same level of performance as the existing schemes when I/O load is low or well balanced. Results from a trace-driven simulation study show that, when a workload is I/Ointensive, the proposed ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: HIPC
• Authors: Xiao Qin, Hong Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, David R. Swanson
• Keywords: HIPC 2003, I/O Load, Load Balancing Schemes, Workload