Load Balancing in Distributed Systems: A Summary Anna IIa~ AT&T Bell Laboratories Naperville, Illinois 60566 Most distributed systems are characterized by distribution of both physical and logical features. The architecture of a distributed system is usually modular. Most distributed systems support a varying number of processing elements. The system hardware, software, data, user software and user data are distributed across the system. An arbitrary number of system and user processes can be executed on various machines in the system. A study of a closely-coupled and a loosely-coupled distributed system is presented in [8]. A simulation model was developed for a VAXcluster and for an Ethernet-based distributed system. The simulator was then validated using data collected in a VAXcluster. A study of the effects of the size and the number of diskservers on the performance of a VAXcluster is presented. The effect of shared file access on the performance of an Ethernet-based distributed system is also studied. A comparison of the performance of an Ethernet-based distributed system and of a VAXcluster of equivalent size is given using data from these experiments. Factors to consider when selecting a machine for process execution include resource availability and optimum use of resources.
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