Reconciling Locality and Load Balancing in Clustered Servers
 
 
Francisco Roberto Arevalo
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
rarevalo@andrew.cmu.edu


 
ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to examine the tradeoffs between locality aware
request distribution and load balancing request distribution across
clustered network servers. It begins by designing and building a
cluster of servers and a gateway that can employ both request
distribution algorithms.  It looks at the delay introduced by the
request propagation method. Then it examines the effects of a strictly
locality aware request distribution on cluster throughput.  These
results are then compared against those from a locality aware and load
balancing request distribution implementation.  These comparisons are
used to show a strictly locality-based distribution system outperforms
a system striving to achieve high locality and good load balancing.