Simulation study of dynamic load balancing for processor sharing servers with finite capacity under generalized halfin-whitt regimes

MATIAS BONAVENTURA; CASTRO, RODRIGO; JONCKHEERE, MATTHIEU

Gothemburg

Conferencia; 51th Winter Simulation Conference; 2018

Defining efficient decentralized load balancing schemes exhibiting low memory and communication costs is an important ongoing topic. In particular, characterizing critical regimes where a system optimizes resource usage is uncharted territory. We consider here dynamic balancing schemes in a set of processor sharing servers with finite capacity. Guided by recent results for insensitive load balancing schemes, we applied a modeling and simulation strategy to characterize systematically and extensively several classes of balancing policies under various statistical conditions. We found that there is a class of efficient policies for which a common critical regime can be identified and interpreted as a generalization of the Halfin-Whitt-Jagerman regime for one-server systems. We also study the gap between full and partial information systems, and analyze the performance sensitivity to jobs´ size distribution. This study is motivated by the network architecture in the ATLAS experiment at CERN, where load balancing plays a key role.