23,582 research outputs found
Unified Concept of Bottleneck
The term `bottleneck` has been extensively used in operations management literature. Management paradigms like the Theory of Constraints focus on the identification and exploitation of bottlenecks. Yet, we show that the term has not been rigorously defined. We provide a classification of bottleneck definitions available in literature and discuss several myths associated with the concept of bottleneck. The apparent diversity of definitions raises the question whether it is possible to have a single bottleneck definition which has as much applicability in high variety job shops as in mass production environments. The key to the formulation of an unified concept of bottleneck lies in relating the concept of bottleneck to the concept of shadow price of resources. We propose an universally applicable bottleneck definition based on the concept of average shadow price. We discuss the procedure for determination of bottleneck values for diverse production environments. The Law of Diminishing Returns is shown to be a sufficient but not necessary condition for the equivalence of the average and the marginal shadow price. The equivalence of these two prices is proved for several environments. Bottleneck identification is the first step in resource acquisition decisions faced by managers. The definition of bottleneck presented in the paper has the potential to not only reduce ambiguity regarding the meaning of the term but also open a new window to the formulation and analysis of a rich set of problems faced by managers.
SELFISHMIGRATE: A Scalable Algorithm for Non-clairvoyantly Scheduling Heterogeneous Processors
We consider the classical problem of minimizing the total weighted flow-time
for unrelated machines in the online \emph{non-clairvoyant} setting. In this
problem, a set of jobs arrive over time to be scheduled on a set of
machines. Each job has processing length , weight , and is
processed at a rate of when scheduled on machine . The online
scheduler knows the values of and upon arrival of the job,
but is not aware of the quantity . We present the {\em first} online
algorithm that is {\em scalable} ((1+\eps)-speed
-competitive for any constant \eps > 0) for the
total weighted flow-time objective. No non-trivial results were known for this
setting, except for the most basic case of identical machines. Our result
resolves a major open problem in online scheduling theory. Moreover, we also
show that no job needs more than a logarithmic number of migrations. We further
extend our result and give a scalable algorithm for the objective of minimizing
total weighted flow-time plus energy cost for the case of unrelated machines
and obtain a scalable algorithm. The key algorithmic idea is to let jobs
migrate selfishly until they converge to an equilibrium. Towards this end, we
define a game where each job's utility which is closely tied to the
instantaneous increase in the objective the job is responsible for, and each
machine declares a policy that assigns priorities to jobs based on when they
migrate to it, and the execution speeds. This has a spirit similar to
coordination mechanisms that attempt to achieve near optimum welfare in the
presence of selfish agents (jobs). To the best our knowledge, this is the first
work that demonstrates the usefulness of ideas from coordination mechanisms and
Nash equilibria for designing and analyzing online algorithms
Runtime-guided mitigation of manufacturing variability in power-constrained multi-socket NUMA nodes
This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493, SEV-2011-00067), by
the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272), by the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant (GA 321253) and the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence. M. Moretó has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship number JCI-2012-15047. M. Casas is supported by the Secretary for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia and the Cofund
programme of the Marie Curie Actions of the 7th R&D Framework Programme of the European Union (Contract 2013 BP B 00243). This work was also partially performed
under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 (LLNL-CONF-689878).
Finally, the authors are grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments, to the RoMoL team, to Xavier Teruel and Kallia Chronaki from the Programming Models group
of BSC and the Computation Department of LLNL for their technical support and useful feedback.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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