Adaptive Receiver Notification for Non-Dedicated WorkstationClusters

Efficient communication in a NOW environment can be a challenging task.Depending on the application, the architecture of the nodes and thecharacteristics of other processes running on the nodes, differentcommunication mechanisms can be appropriate. In this paper, we evaluate anadaptive strategy which provides several communication mechanisms and selectsbetween them depending on the current situation. We focus on strategies forreceiver notification under varying load conditions. Previous research hasshown that in a non-dedicated environment, spin-block strategies can avoidscheduling anomalies which can cause several orders of magnitude of performancedegradation. However, reseach on these strategies have focused on fixedspin-delay. We investigate an adaptive strategy that uses run-time informationto select the spin-delay in an online manner. Our strategy achieves providesbetter performance than static spin-block strategies on workstation clusterswith varying load.