Don’t Starve The AI: System Load Balancing Crucial For Driverless Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

Load balancing is a vital aspect for any system

I recall an occasion when my children had decided to cook a meal in our kitchen and went whole hog into the matter (so to speak). One aspect that caught my attention was the use of our stove top. The stove top has four burner positions. On an everyday cooking process, I believe that four heating positions is sufficient. I could see that with the extravagant dinner that was being put together, the fact that there were only four available was a constraint. Indeed, seemingly a quite difficult constraint.

During the cooking process, there were quite a number of pots and pans containing food that needed to be heated-up. I’d wager that at one point there were at least a dozen of such pots and pans in the midst of containing food and requiring some amount of heating. Towards the start of the cooking, it was somewhat manageable because they only were using three of the available heating spots. By using just three, it allowed them to then allocate one spot, the fourth one, as an “extra” for round robin needs. For this fourth spot, they were using it to do quick warm-ups and meanwhile the other three spots were for truly doing a thorough cooking job that required a substantive amount of dedicated cooking time.

Pots and pans were sliding on and off that fourth spot like a hockey puck on ice. The other three spots had large pots that were gradually each coming to a bubbling and high-heat condition. When one of the three pots had cooked well enough, the enterprising cooks took it off the burner almost immediately and placed it onto a countertop waiting area they had established for super-heated pots and pans that could simmer for a bit.

As a computer scientist at heart, I was delighted to see them performing a delicate dance of system load balancing.

System Load Balancing Is Unheralded But Crucial

You’ve probably had situations involving multiple processors or maybe multiple web sites wherein you had to do a load balance across them. This is usually due to having a limited number of resources and wanting to try and ensure that they are able to be used effectively and efficiently.