Cache-aware load balancing for question answering

The need for high performance and throughput Question Answering (QA) systems demands for their migration to distributed environments. However, even in such cases it is necessary to provide the distributed system with cooperative caches and load balancing facilities in order to achieve the desired goals. Until now, the literature on QA has not considered such a complex system as a whole. Currently, the load balancer regulates the assignment of tasks based only on the CPU and I/O loads without considering the status of the system cache. This paper investigates the load balancing problem proposing two novel algorithms that take into account the distributed cache status, in addition to the CPU and I/O load in each processing node. We have implemented, and tested the proposed algorithms in a fully fledged distributed QA system. The two algorithms show that the choice of using the status of the cache was determinant in achieving good performance, and high throughput for QA systems. Categori...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: David Dominguez-Sal, Mihai Surdeanu, Josep Aguilar-Saborit, Josep-Lluis Larriba-Pey
• Keywords: CIKM 2008, I/O Load, Information Management, Load Balancing Facilities, QA Systems