1 \documentclass[11pt]{article}
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8 \title{Summary of changes}
9 \author{\textit{Best effort strategy and virtual load for asynchronous iterative load balancing}}
14 \textbf{We thank the editor and both reviewers for their valuable comments and efforts which helped us improve this paper. Below, some details and answers are provided corresponding to their comments.}
28 \textit{ The paper considers asynchronous load balancing algorithms based on
29 earlier work by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis.
30 A new best effort strategy is proposed that tries to balance the load
31 of a node by sending some load to neighboring nodes with less load.
32 The goal is an even distribution of the load.
33 Load information messages are used between neighboring nodes to enable these
34 neighboring nodes to determine the amount of load to distribute in case of a
35 currently uneven distribution.
36 An experimental evaluation is provided using the SimGrid framework for different
37 topologies (line, torus, cube).}
40 The paper is generally well written and addresses a useful problem.
41 The new algorithm is described in detail and it provides advantages over
42 the previous algorithm by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis.
43 The experimental evaluation with SimGrid is detailed.
44 It would have been interesting to see a comparison with some of the more recent
45 load balancing algorithms described in the section on related work, see
46 references [7,9,24] as examples.
47 The paper needs some proof-reading due to several typos.
48 Nevertheless, the paper is suitable for publication.}
57 \textit{This paper is about a practical implementation of a strategy for iterative load balancing using a best effort strategy. The idea is to send data to the neighbors that are under the average load in order to obtain that each neighbor has exactly the average.\\
58 To avoid the ping-pong effect they use a k-factor to reduce the amount of load. They also distinguish between control message (metadata about the load that is going to be exchanged) and data message (actual exchanged load) that allows to have a more precise and fast estimation of the load at a given time.\\
59 The experiments are convincing and I like very much the discussion about the data and the conclusion drawn from them. I think the authors did a very good job in that aspect. }
61 \subsection*{Request 1: My only concern is the section 5.2. I did not understand clearly what is this k-factor. The authors say, "Roughly speaking...", I do not what a fuzzy explanation but I need a correct, precise and operational description of that aspect of the work. I think the authors should present a clear explanation of what they do.