A reusable load balancer for parallel search problems

Abstract In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a reusable load balancer for parallelsearch problems. Parallel search problems are a significant research topic in the parallel processing area: these applications expose irregularities that require dynamic load balancing techniques. Software for dynamic load balancing should be reusable. Our load balancer can be developed independently from the application -and thus be replaced and reused- as it does not directly interact with the application itself. Our prototype implementation runs on a transputer system; we used different load balancing strategies: sender-initiated, receiver-initiated and symmetrically-initiated. The modularity of our load balancer is illustrated by the fact that we could easily replace the load balancer by different alternatives and compare the performance results.