Performance of adaptive space sharing processor allocation policies for distributed-memory multicomputers

Several space sharing policies have been proposed for distributed-memory multicomputer systems. We consider adaptive space sharing policies, as these policies provide a better performance than fixed and static policies by taking system load and user requirements into account. In this paper we propose an improved space sharing policy by suggesting a simple modification to a previously proposed policy. We study performance sensitivity of the original and modified policies to job structure and various other system and workload parameters like variances in inter-arrival times and job service times. The results presented here demonstrate that the modified policy performs substantially better than the original policy. (C) 1999 Academic Press.