Dynamic load balancing inspired by division of labour in ant colonies

Distributed computing systems may be constructed from various commodity computing resources in an organization in order to exploit otherwise idle processing time. When such a system is used to solve embarrassingly parallel problems, the performance of each computing resource in the system becomes a significant factor in overall processing performance. This paper shows that processing performance in a distributed computing system used to process tasks of equal duration declines as individual processing resources diverge with respect to performance. A new dynamic load balancing algorithm based on the division of labour in ant colonies is proposed and its viability tested in terms of the time taken to complete a distributed computation and the bandwidth utilized within the system.