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SAHAYOG: A test bed for evaluating dynamic load‐sharing policies
Author(s) -
Dikshit Piyush,
Tripathi Satish K.,
Jalote Pankaj
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380190502
Subject(s) - computer science , node (physics) , load sharing , minicomputer , distributed computing , fault tolerance , fault (geology) , test (biology) , data sharing , load testing , real time computing , operating system , engineering , medicine , paleontology , alternative medicine , software engineering , structural engineering , pathology , seismology , biology , geology
This paper describes the implementation of a test bed called SAHAYOG, for evaluating dynamic load‐sharing policies in which job‐transfer decisions are based on the state of the system. The test bed is implemented on a network of AT&T 3B2 minicomputers. It provides an interactive user interface for conducting load‐sharing experiments. Based on user‐specified parameters it creates independent job streams at different nodes in the network. Jobs are transferred among the nodes by the load‐sharing algorithm being evaluated. Each node collects data about the jobs, which are used to generate statistics about the experiment. Five load‐sharing algorithms are implemented and evaluated using the test bed under different load conditions and for various parameter values. These experiments confirm some earlier results about load sharing and also provide some new insights. SAHAYOG also contains an optional fault‐tolerance feature to handle single‐node failures, and evaluates the effect of fault tolerance on the performance of different policies.