Abstract
Server farms are ubiquitous in applications ranging from Web server farms to high-performance supercomputing systems to call centers. The popularity of the server farm architecture is understandable, as it allows for increased performance, while being cost-effective and easily scalable.
Given the prevalence of server farms, it is surprising that even at this late date so little is understood regarding their performance as compared with their single-server counterpart, particularly with respect to scheduling. Part of the problem is that there are at least three disjoint communities studying scheduling in server farms, including the SIGMETRICS community, the INFORMS community, and the SPAA/STOC/FOCS community, all of which have different approaches and goals. One of our goals in this talk is to make researchers aware of results in these different communities.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Harchol-Balter, M., Downey, A.: Exploiting process lifetime distributions for dynamic load balancing. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 15(3) (1997)
Barford, P., Crovella, M.E.: Generating representative Web workloads for network and server performance evaluation. In: ACM SIGMETRICS Conference, pp. 151–160 (July 1998)
Shaikh, A., Rexford, J., Shin, K.G.: Load-sensitive routing of long-lived ip flows. In: Proceedings of SIGCOMM (September 1999)
Schroeder, B., Harchol-Balter, M.: Evaluation of task assignment policies for supercomputing servers: The case for load unbalancing and fairness. Cluster Computing: The journal of Networks, Software Tools, and Applications 7(2), 151–161 (2004)
Harchol-Balter, M., Schroeder, B., Bansal, N., Agrawal, M.: Size-based Scheduling to Improve Web Performance. Transactions of Computer Systems 21(2), 207–233 (2003)
Wierman, A., Harchol-Balter, M.: Classifying Scheduling Policies with respect to Unfairness in an M/GI/1. In: Proceedings of the ACM Sigmetrics Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS), pp. 238–249 (June 2003)
Brown, P.: Comparing FB and PS Scheduling Policies. In: Eighth Workkshop on Mathematical Performance Modeling and Analysis (MAMA 2006) (June 2006)
Schroeder, B., Harchol-Balter, M.: Web servers under overload: How scheduling can help. ACMTOIT 6(1) (February 2006)
Yang, C.W., Wierman, A., Shakkottai, S., Harchol-Balter, M.: Tail asymptotics for policies favoring short jobs in a many-flows regime. In: ACM Sigmetrics 2006 Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (2006)
Schroeder, B., Wierman, A., Harchol-Balter, M.: Closed versus Open System Models: a Cautionary Tale. In: Proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2006), pp. 239–252 (May 2006)
Harchol-Balter, M., Crovella, M., Murta, C.: On Choosing a Task Assignment Policy for a Distributed Server System. IEEE Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 59, 204–228 (1999)
Harchol-Balter, M., Vesilo, R.: To Balance or Unbalance Load in Size-Interval Task Allocation (in submission, 2008)
Osogami, T., Harchol-Balter, M., Scheller-Wolf, A.: Analysis of cycle stealing with switching times and thresholds. Performance Evaluation 61(4), 369–374 (2005)
Fayole, G., Iasnogorodski, R.: Two coupled processors: the reduction to a reimann-hilbert problem. Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und verwandte Gebiete 47, 325–351 (1979)
Foley, R., McDonald, D.: Exact asymptotics of a queueing network with a cross-trained server. In: Proceedings of INFORMS Annual Meeting (2003)
Borst, S., Boxma, O., van Uitert, M.: The asymptotic workload behavior of two coupled queues. Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications 43, 81–102 (2003)
Harchol-Balter, M.: Task Assignment with Unknown Duration. Journal of the ACM 49(2), 260–288 (2002)
Nelson, R.D., Philips, T.K.: An Approximation to the Response Time for Shortest Queue Routing. In: ACM SIGMETRICS Conference, pp. 181–189 (May 1989)
Nelson, R.D., Philips, T.K.: An Approximation for the Mean Response Time for Shortest Queue Routing with General Interarrival and Service Times. Performance Evaluation 17, 123–139 (1993)
Wessels, J., Adan, I., Zijm, W.: Analysis of the asymmetric shortest queue problem. Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications 8, 1–58 (1991)
Gupta, V., Harchol-Balter, M., Sigman, K., Whitt, W.: Analysis of join-the-shortest-queue routing for web server farms. In: PERFORMANCE 2007 Conference. IFIP WG 7.3 International Symposium on Computer Modeling, Measurement and Evaluation, Cologne, Germany (October 2007)
Harchol-Balter, M., Osogami, T., Scheller-Wolf, A., Wierman, A.: Multi-server queueing systems with multiple priority classes. Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications 51(3-4), 331–360 (2005)
Leonardi, S., Raz, D.: Approximating total flow time on parallel machines. In: ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 110–119 (1997)
Avrahami, N., Azar, Y.: Minimizing total flow time and total completion time with immediate dispatching. In: ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 1997), pp. 11–18 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Harchol-Balter, M. (2008). Scheduling for Server Farms: Approaches and Open Problems. In: Kounev, S., Gorton, I., Sachs, K. (eds) Performance Evaluation: Metrics, Models and Benchmarks. SIPEW 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5119. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69814-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69814-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69813-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69814-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)