The development of powerful computers and high speed networks has motivated much research in making effective use of the computing power in networks of workstations. The computing environment of large organizations typically con-sists of multiple interconnected LANs sometimes called intranets. If the LANs are under different administrative control (for example, belonging to different depart-ments), the system is known as a multidomain system. As the network speeds of LANs and WANs continue to increase, it is possible to improve system through-put as well as response times by dispatching the computing load more evenly among the workstations. System availability is also enhanced as a consequence....[ Read more ]

The development of powerful computers and high speed networks has motivated much research in making effective use of the computing power in networks of workstations. The computing environment of large organizations typically con-sists of multiple interconnected LANs sometimes called intranets. If the LANs are under different administrative control (for example, belonging to different depart-ments), the system is known as a multidomain system. As the network speeds of LANs and WANs continue to increase, it is possible to improve system through-put as well as response times by dispatching the computing load more evenly among the workstations. System availability is also enhanced as a consequence.

This objective is, however, difficult to achieve in the multidomain environ-ment. The architectures, networks and speeds of workstations in different do-mains will likely be different, and resource sharing among them is limited or nonexistent. Load balancing in this highly heterogeneous environment is a diffi-cult and challenging problem.

This thesis is concerned with developing a sound theoretical foundation for load balancing in the multidomain environment. As proof of concept, a large part of the framework has also been implemented. A kernel called BALANCE has been built to hide the network and computer architecture heterogeneities. By implementing related services as generic servers, reusable parallel and dis-tributed applications can be easily constructed. BALANCE is further enhanced by the software balmake which performs automatic software construction in the multidomain environment with minimum communication cost.

A new dynamic load balancing approach called the hydrodynamic framework has been developed for multidomain systems. This framework is analyzed math-ematically and it is proven that all scheduling algorithms under this framework converge geometrically to the optimal state. The important factors which in-fluence load balancing speed have also been investigated. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, the algorithms are applied to solve sev-eral practical problems. The work presented in this thesis forms a sound basis for effectively harnessing the computing power in intranets made popular by the rapid growth of the Internet.