15,111 research outputs found
A -Competitive Algorithm for Scheduling Packets with Deadlines
In the online packet scheduling problem with deadlines (PacketScheduling, for
short), the goal is to schedule transmissions of packets that arrive over time
in a network switch and need to be sent across a link. Each packet has a
deadline, representing its urgency, and a non-negative weight, that represents
its priority. Only one packet can be transmitted in any time slot, so, if the
system is overloaded, some packets will inevitably miss their deadlines and be
dropped. In this scenario, the natural objective is to compute a transmission
schedule that maximizes the total weight of packets which are successfully
transmitted. The problem is inherently online, with the scheduling decisions
made without the knowledge of future packet arrivals. The central problem
concerning PacketScheduling, that has been a subject of intensive study since
2001, is to determine the optimal competitive ratio of online algorithms,
namely the worst-case ratio between the optimum total weight of a schedule
(computed by an offline algorithm) and the weight of a schedule computed by a
(deterministic) online algorithm.
We solve this open problem by presenting a -competitive online
algorithm for PacketScheduling (where is the golden ratio),
matching the previously established lower bound.Comment: Major revision of the analysis and some other parts of the paper.
Another revision will follo
TimeTrader: Exploiting Latency Tail to Save Datacenter Energy for On-line Data-Intensive Applications
Datacenters running on-line, data-intensive applications (OLDIs) consume
significant amounts of energy. However, reducing their energy is challenging
due to their tight response time requirements. A key aspect of OLDIs is that
each user query goes to all or many of the nodes in the cluster, so that the
overall time budget is dictated by the tail of the replies' latency
distribution; replies see latency variations both in the network and compute.
Previous work proposes to achieve load-proportional energy by slowing down the
computation at lower datacenter loads based directly on response times (i.e.,
at lower loads, the proposal exploits the average slack in the time budget
provisioned for the peak load). In contrast, we propose TimeTrader to reduce
energy by exploiting the latency slack in the sub- critical replies which
arrive before the deadline (e.g., 80% of replies are 3-4x faster than the
tail). This slack is present at all loads and subsumes the previous work's
load-related slack. While the previous work shifts the leaves' response time
distribution to consume the slack at lower loads, TimeTrader reshapes the
distribution at all loads by slowing down individual sub-critical nodes without
increasing missed deadlines. TimeTrader exploits slack in both the network and
compute budgets. Further, TimeTrader leverages Earliest Deadline First
scheduling to largely decouple critical requests from the queuing delays of
sub- critical requests which can then be slowed down without hurting critical
requests. A combination of real-system measurements and at-scale simulations
shows that without adding to missed deadlines, TimeTrader saves 15-19% and
41-49% energy at 90% and 30% loading, respectively, in a datacenter with 512
nodes, whereas previous work saves 0% and 31-37%.Comment: 13 page
Non-preemptive Scheduling in a Smart Grid Model and its Implications on Machine Minimization
We study a scheduling problem arising in demand response management in smart
grid. Consumers send in power requests with a flexible feasible time interval
during which their requests can be served. The grid controller, upon receiving
power requests, schedules each request within the specified interval. The
electricity cost is measured by a convex function of the load in each timeslot.
The objective is to schedule all requests with the minimum total electricity
cost. Previous work has studied cases where jobs have unit power requirement
and unit duration. We extend the study to arbitrary power requirement and
duration, which has been shown to be NP-hard. We give the first online
algorithm for the general problem, and prove that the problem is fixed
parameter tractable. We also show that the online algorithm is asymptotically
optimal when the objective is to minimize the peak load. In addition, we
observe that the classical non-preemptive machine minimization problem is a
special case of the smart grid problem with min-peak objective, and show that
we can solve the non-preemptive machine minimization problem asymptotically
optimally
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