Load balancing art in a common memory with distributed structure.

摘要

In a system with several users MU using a common or shared storage comprising a plurality of memory banks MB, a memory load balancing technique is introduced which causes an even distribution of the storage load among the whole set of memory banks.;For each user MU (in its memory interface MI) a table or map is kept reflecting the load status of all memory banks. The assignment of a new storage record is requested only from a memory bank with relatively low load status.;Upon each memory command which is sent from a user to a memory bank (for creating a record and for storing or fetching data), a reply (acknowledgement) is returned to the user. With each such reply, an indication of the current load status of the respective memory bank is returned, and the user's load status table is updated. Thus, no extra data transfers are necessary to keep all users up-to-date.