To deal with dynamic load balancing in large scale distributed systems, we propose to organize computing resources following a logical peer-to-peer overlay and to distribute the load according to the so-defined overlay. We use a tree as a logical structure connecting distributed nodes and we balance the load according to the size of induced subtrees. We conduct extensive experiments involving up to 1000 computing cores and provide a throughout analysis of different properties of our generic approach for two different applications, namely, the standard Unbalanced Tree Search and the more challenging parallel Branch-and-Bound algorithm. Substantial improvements are reported in comparison with the classical random work stealing and two finely tuned application specific strategies taken from the literature.