On the Impact of Heterogeneity and Back-End Scheduling in Load Balancing Designs

H.-L. Chen, J. R. Marden, A. Wierman
2009 IEEE INFOCOM 2009 - The 28th Conference on Computer Communications  
Load balancing is a common approach to task assignment in distributed architectures. In this paper, we show that the degree of inefficiency in load balancing designs is highly dependent on the scheduling discipline used at each of the backend servers. Traditionally, the back-end scheduler can be modeled as Processor Sharing (PS), in which case the degree of inefficiency grows linearly with the number of servers. However, if the backend scheduler is changed to Shortest Remaining Processing Time
more » ... SRPT), the degree of inefficiency can be independent of the number of servers, instead depending only on the heterogeneity of the speeds of the servers. Further, switching the back-end scheduler to SRPT can provide significant improvements in the overall mean response time of the system as long as the heterogeneity of the server speeds is small.
doi:10.1109/infcom.2009.5062152 dblp:conf/infocom/ChenMW09 fatcat:pdnqp7bw3zdmfchuoza7336rnq