Thomas Decker, Markus Fischer, Reinhard Lüling, Stefan Tschöke

Heterogeneous parallel computing systems built up by closely connected
networks of workstations or personal computers are a cheap alternative
to dedicated parallel supercomputer systems. As these  systems are widely
available in academic and industrial environments it is becoming  increasingly
popular to use these resources to solve time consuming calculations.

In this paper, the question of load balancing on heterogeneous parallel
computing systems  is addressed. The paper presents a general methodology to
transform existing load balancing methods that are used for load balancing on
homogeneous parallel computing systems into methods, which take into account the
special characteristics of heterogeneous systems.

The here presented strategy is applied to a load balancing algorithm, which has
been used for distributed branch & bound  applications on homogeneous parallel
computing systems. Experiments conducted on a 16-node ATM cluster show that
the speedup of the parallel branch & bound application can be increased
considerably by the use of a transformed algorithm.