Adaptive Load Balancing in a Multi-Processor System with a Central Job Scheduler

Adaptive control theory is concerned with the design of control laws which result in a desired behavior of systems some of whose characteristics are unknown. Despite the promising achievements in the application of adaptive control techniques in various environments (industrial systems, aerospace systems, etc.), not much is available in the literature on adaptive control applications in the area of computer systems, or, for the matter, queueing systems. One of the reasons for such a situation is the fact that computer systems engineering cannot yet base itself on quantitative laws similar to those which scientific foundations of other types of engineering (e.g., the laws of mechanics, electromagnetism, etc.). This paper represents an effort to look at the load balancing problem for a multiprocessor system from a classical system control point of view, and to adopt an adaptive control theoretic approach.