A dynamic load-balancing approach for efficient remote interactive visualization

In this paper, we present a dynamic load-balancing scheme in a networked heterogeneous computing environment and apply it to a Web-based scientific visualization system, whose efficiency requires a much stronger support than what is needed for visualizations merely on a single computer. To achieve the overall system resource utilization and to determine the most cost-effective strategy for such computing applications, we adopt a distributed asynchronous pipeline approach and a dynamic load-balancing algorithm at server side to distribute tasks among the whole system. To achieve efficient pipelining, it essentially requires a network with high bandwidth and low latency; an efficient interprocess communication mechanism on the network, and proper adaptation and partitioning of the visualization computations through the pipeline. By taking each client´s capability into consideration, this dynamic approach can dispatch some stages of the visualization pipeline to client for executing. Besides, we also present a mechanism for selecting a computing unit that best suits for executing a specific visualization computation in the incoming job. We have demonstrated a number of static and dynamic configurations in task allocation and functional partitioning in order to realize the target application.