A load monitoring facility for task scheduling in heterogeneous environments

Whilst the concept of a virtual metacomputer over a networked collection of heterogeneous workstations has slowly emerged, there are still some shortcomings of these systems. For example, some systems are still incapable of balancing the load amongst the workstations; the problem is accentuated by the heterogeneity of the computers. To balance the load, first of all, the load information needs to be collected. In this paper, we first present the design and implementation of our load monitoring facility, and then discuss how the information gathered can be used in task scheduling. We will also use PVM as an example to show how our facility can be integrated with an existing system. Finally, the results obtained in our experiments will be discussed