Efficient communication in a NOW environment can be a challenging
task. Depending on the application, the architecture of the nodes and
the characteristics of other processes running on the nodes, different
communication strategies can be appropriate. In this paper, we evaluate
an adaptive scheme which selects between multiple communication
strategies depending on the current situation. We focus on strategies
for receiver notification under varying load conditions. Previous
research has shown that in a non-dedicated environment, spin-block
strategies can avoid scheduling anomalies which can cause several orders
of magnitude of performance degradation. However, research on these
strategies has focused on a fixed spin-delay. Our scheme achieves better
performance than static spin-block schemes on workstation clusters with
varying load.


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