2 \documentclass[smallextended]{svjour3}
7 \title{Best effort strategy and virtual load for asynchronous iterative load balancing}
9 \author{Raphaël Couturier \and
14 \institute{F. Author \at
16 Tel.: +123-45-678910\\
18 \email{fauthor@example.com} % \\
19 % \emph{Present address:} of F. Author % if needed
30 Most of the time, asynchronous load balancing algorithms have extensively been
31 studied in a theoretical point of view. The Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis' algorithm
32 is certainly the most well known algorithm for which the convergence proof is
33 given. From a practical point of view, when a node wants to balance a part of
34 its load to some of its neighbors, the strategy is not described. In this
35 paper, we propose a strategy called \texttt{best effort} which tries to balance
36 the load of a node to all its less loaded neighbors while ensuring that all the
37 nodes concerned by the load balancing phase have the same amount of load.
38 Moreover, asynchronous iterative algorithms in which an asynchronous load
39 balancing algorithm is implemented most of the time can dissociate messages
40 concerning load transfers and message concerning load information. In order to
41 increase the converge of a load balancing algorithm, we propose a simple
42 heuristic called \texttt{virtual load} which allows a node that receives an load
43 information message to integrate the load that it will receive latter in its
44 load (virtually) and consequently sends a (real) part of its load to some of its
45 neighbors. In order to validate our approaches, we have defined a simulator
46 based on SimGrid which allowed us to conduct many experiments.
53 Load balancing algorithms are extensively used in parallel and distributed
54 applications in order to reduce the execution times. They can be applied in
55 different scientific fields from high performance computation to micro sensor
56 networks. They are iterative by nature. In literature many kinds of load
57 balancing algorithms have been studied. They can be classified according
58 different criteria: centralized or decentralized, in static or dynamic
59 environment, with homogeneous or heterogeneous load, using synchronous or
60 asynchronous iterations, with a static topology or a dynamic one which evolves
61 during time. In this work, we focus on asynchronous load balancing algorithms
62 where computer nodes are considered homogeneous and with homogeneous load with
63 no external load. In this context, Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis have proposed an
64 algorithm which is definitively a reference for many works. In their work, they
65 proved that under classical hypotheses of asynchronous iterative algorithms and
66 a special constraint avoiding \texttt{ping-pong} effect, an asynchronous
67 iterative algorithm converge to the uniform load distribution. This work has
68 been extended by many authors. For example, DASUD propose a version working with