Anticipating performance information of newly portable computers on the WLAN for load balancing

Abstract

Parallel and distributed computing over heterogeneous networks is a hot topic nowadays. We have used a combination of a Local Area Network (LAN) and a Wireless LAN (WLAN) to implement Master-Slave parallel distributed programs which exhibit dependences among iterations and parallel calculation inside an iteration. In this environment it is necessary to consider the unbalance communication bandwidths and computing power of fixed and portable computers to avoid long idle times. To solve this problem, in our previous work, we developed an efficient load balancing strategy considering that no new processes are spawned in new portable computers at run time. Due to it is not realistic, in this paper we present a new method for balancing the parallel calculations when parallel processes are spawned on portable computers which uses performance information supplied by a framework based on the standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). In this way, idle times are minimized and better execution times are obtained.