Abstract
A dynamic load balancing policy with a central job dispatcher, called the LBC policy, is proposed for distributed systems. The design of this policy is motivated by the operation of a single-queue-multi-server queuing system. The average job response time of this policy is the same as that of a single-queue-multi-server system which is the best achievable performance when the communication delay is reduced to zero. Hence, this policy is expected to provide near minimum average job response time for distributed systems with high-speed communication subnets. The performance of this policy is studied for systems with non-negligible job transfer delays in the following three aspects: average job response time, overhead due to information exchanges, and sensitivity to heterogeneous load.