Immunological Approaches to Load Balancing in MIMD Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how principles from the mammalian immune system can inspire effective load balancing strategies for MIMD parallel computers, demonstrated through an image processing application with promising speedup results.

Contribution

It introduces immune system-inspired heuristics for load balancing in MIMD systems, providing a novel approach grounded in biological processes.

Findings

Immune-inspired heuristics improve load balancing effectiveness.

Application to image processing yields good speedup.

Biological principles can inform computer system optimization.

Abstract

Effective utilization of Multiple-Instruction-Multiple-Data (MIMD) parallel computers requires the application of good load balancing techniques. In this paper we show that heuristics derived from observation of complex natural systems, such as the mammalian immune system, can lead to effective load balancing strategies. In particular, the immune system processes of regulation, suppression, tolerance, and memory are seen to be powerful load balancing mechanisms. We provide a detailed example of our approach applied to parallelization of an image processing task, that of extracting the circuit design from the images of the layers of a CMOS integrated circuit. The results of this experiment show that good speedup characteristics can be obtained when using immune system derived load balancing strategies.