ylfink@water.UUCP (10/09/87)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SEMINAR ACTIVITIES DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR - Thursday, October 22, 1987 Professor Derek Eager, from the University of Saskatchewan, will speak on ``Adaptive Load Sharing in Distributed Systems''. TIME: 3:30 PM ROOM: MC 6091A ABSTRACT A distributed computer system consists of a collection of individual systems (nodes) that share resources. Distributed systems utilizing adaptive load sharing attempt to share processing power, and thus improve performance, by transparently transferring work between nodes. The substantial potential benefits of load sharing have prompted a number of studies of various alternative specific policies, as well as the implementation of various system mechanisms to support load sharing. This talk concerns several fundamental questions regarding the appropriate level of complexity of load sharing policies. Evidence is presented suggesting that policies that collect only small amounts of system state information, and that use this information in simple ways, yield most of the possible performance benefits. Also considered in the talk are the additional benefits that are potentially offered by load sharing policies that will perform ``migration'' (the movement of jobs that have initiated execution) in comparison to the simpler non-migratory policies that rely solely on ``initial placement''.