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Deferred Assignment Scheduling in Cluster-Based Servers

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new scheduling policy for cluster-based servers called DAS (Deferred Assignment Scheduling). The main idea in DAS is to defer scheduling as much as possible in order to make better use of the accumulated information on job sizes. In broad outline, DAS operates as follows: (1) incoming jobs are held by the dispatcher in a buffer; (2) the dispatcher monitors the number of jobs being processed by each server; (3) when the number of jobs at a server queue drops below a prescribed threshold, the dispatcher sends to it the shortest job in its buffer.

To gauge the efficacy of DAS, the paper presents simulation studies, using various data traces. The studies collected response times and slowdowns for two cluster configurations under multi-threaded and multi-process back-end server architectures. The experimental results show that in both architectures, DAS outperforms the Round-Robin policy in all traffic regimes, and the JSQ (Join Shortest Queue) policy in medium and heavy traffic regimes.

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Correspondence to Victoria Ungureanu.

Additional information

Victoria Ungureanu (ACM) is a visiting researcher at DIMACS. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Benjamin Melamed is a Professor II at the Rutgers Business School- Newark and New Brunswick, Department of MSIS. Melamed received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Statistics from Tel Aviv University in 1972, and a M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1973 and 1976, respectively. He was awarded an AT&T Fellow in 1988 and an IEEE Fellow in 1994. He became an IFIP WG7.3 member in 1997, and was elected to Beta Gamma Sigma in 1998.

Michael N. Katehakis is Professor of Management Science in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems, at Rutgers. He studied at the University of Athens, Diploma (1974) in Mathematics, at the University of South Florida, M.A. (1978) in Statistics, and at Columbia University, Ph.D. (1980) in Operations Research. He won the 1992 Wolfowitz Prize (with Govindarajulu Z.)

Phillip G. Bradford (ACM) is on the faculty in Computer Science Department at the University of Alabama. He earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University in Bloomington, his MS at The University of Kansas and his BS at Rutgers University.

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Ungureanu, V., Melamed, B., Katehakis, M. et al. Deferred Assignment Scheduling in Cluster-Based Servers. Cluster Comput 9, 57–65 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-006-4897-9

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