Publication
Title
Randomized work stealing versus sharing in large-scale systems with non-exponential job sizes
Author
Abstract
Work sharing and work stealing are two scheduling paradigms to redistribute work when performing distributed computations. In work sharing, processors attempt to migrate pending jobs to other processors in the hope of reducing response times. In work stealing, on the other hand, underutilized processors attempt to steal jobs from other processors. Both paradigms generate a certain communication overhead and the question addressed in this paper is which of the two reduces the response time the most given that they use the same amount of communication overhead. Prior work presented explicit bounds, for large scale systems, on when randomized work sharing outperforms randomized work stealing in case of Poisson arrivals and exponential job sizes and indicated that work sharing is best when the load is below phi - 1 approximate to 0.6180, with phi being the golden ratio. In this paper we revisit this problem and study the impact of the job size distribution using a mean field model. We present an efficient method to determine the boundary between the regions where sharing or stealing is best for a given job size distribution, as well as bounds that apply to any (phase-type) job size distribution. The main insight is that work stealing benefits significantly from having more variable job sizes and work sharing may become inferior to work stealing for loads as small as 1/2 + epsilon for any epsilon > 0.
Language
English
Source (journal)
IEEE/ACM transactions on networking / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Association for Computing Machinery. - Piscataway, N.J.
Publication
Piscataway, N.J. : 2019
ISSN
1063-6692
DOI
10.1109/TNET.2019.2939040
Volume/pages
27 :5 (2019) , p. 2137-2149
ISI
000502059800027
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 08.01.2020
Last edited 12.11.2024
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