LOAD SHARING CONTROLLER FOR OPTIMIZING MONETARY COST

摘要

PURPOSE: A load sharing controller for optimizing monetary cost is provided to minimize the finish time of the processors within a cost constraint, and to optimize by transferring portions of the load from the expensive processors to the cheaper processor while maintaining an acceptable finish time for all processing. CONSTITUTION: A load sharing system (100) which minimizes overall costs by assigning segments of a divisible load to distributed processors (105, 107, 109) based on the monetary cost of each processor. The distributed processors are connected to a network such as a local area network (114) or the Internet. A controller (103) divides a divisible load and assigns each segment of the load to a processor based on the processor's monetary cost which is a function of its operating cost and its processing speed.