A load balancing mechanism and technique that monitors a memory interface
associated with a processor resource in a processor pool associated with
at least one node of a computer network. The monitoring determines the
actual load activity executed by the processor during a specified period
of time. The mechanism comprises a hardware access monitor configured to
determine the true activity of each processor resource. The access
monitor tracks certain memory requests over the memory interface and
stores the requests in a counter assigned to each processor. The access
monitor then collects statistics from each processor resource of the pool
and provides those statistics to a central load balancing resource for
use when determining assignment of loads (tasks) to the various processor
resources.