LOAD SHARING CONTROLLER FOR OPTIMIZING MONETARY COST

摘要

A load sharing system (100) which minimizes overal 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. The allocation is then optimized by transferring portions of the load from the expensive processors to the cheaper processor while maintaining an acceptable finish time for all processing. The optimization can also be performed for minimizing the finish time of the processors within a cost constraint.