Experimental evaluation of distributed load balancing implementations

The evaluation of load balancing algorithms for use in general-purpose distributed systems has traditionally been carried out by discrete event simulation. This paper describes a testbed which supports the artificial creation of workload and the measurement of performance for load balancing algorithm implementations based on job migration in a small distributed system. Nine load balancing algorithms are implemented and evaluated under a range of environmental conditions. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of load balancing and indicate the superiority of the centralised non-adaptive and distributed adaptive approaches. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.