Compromise Scheme for Assigning Tasks on a Homogeneous Distributed System

We consider the problem of assigning tasks to homogeneous nodes in the distributed system, so as to minimize the amount of communication, while balancing the processors' loads. This issue can be posed as the graph partitioning problem. Given an undirected graph G=(nodes, edges), where nodes represent task modules and edges represent communication, the goal is to divide n, the number of processors, as to balance the processors' loads, while minimizing the capacity of edges cut. Since these two optimization criteria conflict each other, one has to make a compromise between them according to the given task type. We propose a new cost function to evaluate static task assignments and a heuristic algorithm to solve the transformed problem, explicitly describing the tradeoff between the two goals. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms an existing representative approach for a variety of task and processing systems.