'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Load balancing is a common approach for 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 back-end
scheduler is changed to Shortest Remaining Processing Time
(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