Efficient Load Balancing Algorithm in Grid Environment

Abstract

Grid technology has emerged as a new way of large-scale distributed computing with high-performance orientation. Grid computing is being adopted in various areas from academic, industry research to government use. Grids are becoming platforms for high performance and distributed computing. Grid computing is the next generation IT infrastructure that promises to transform the way organizations and individuals compute, communicate and collaborate. The goal of Grid computing is to create the illusion of a simple but large and powerful self-managing virtual computer out of a large collection of connected heterogeneous systems sharing various combinations of resources Grid Resource Management is defined as the process of identifying requirements, matching resources to applications, allocating those resources, and scheduling and monitoring Grid resources over time in order to run Grid applications as efficiently as possible. Resource discovery is the first phase of resource management. Scheduling and monitoring is the next step. Scheduling process directs the job to appropriate resource and monitoring process monitors the resources. The resources which will be heavily loaded will act as server of task and the resources which are Lightly Loaded will act as receiver of task. Task will be migrated from heavily loaded node to lightly loaded node. Resources are dynamic in nature so the load of resources varies with change in configuration of Grid so the Load Balancing of the tasks in a Grid environment can significantly influence Grid’s performance. A poor scheduling policy may leave many processors idle while a clever one may consume an unduly large portion of the total CPU cycles. The main goal of load balancing is to provide a distributed, low cost, scheme that balances the load across all the processors. To improve the global throughput of Grid resources, effective and efficient load balancing algorithms are fundamentally important. Various strategies, algorithms and policies have been proposed, implemented and classified for implementing Load balancing in Grid environment. Focus of this thesis is on analyzing Load Balancing requirements in a Grid environment and proposing a centralized and sender initiated load balancing algorithm. A load balancing algorithm has been implemented and tested in a simulated Grid environment.