This paper presents the design of Mercury, a scalable protocol for supporting multi-attribute rangebased searches. Mercury differs from previous range-based query systems in that it supports multiple attributes as well as performs explicit load balancing. Efficient routing and load balancing are implemented using novel light-weight sampling mechanisms for uniformly sampling random nodes in a highly dynamic overlay network. Our evaluation shows that Mercury is able to achieve its goals of logarithmic-hop routing and near-uniform load balancing. We also show that a publish-subscribe system based on the Mercury protocol can be used to construct a distributed object repository providing efficient and scalable object lookups and updates. By providing applications a range-based query language to express their subscriptions to object updates, Mercury considerably simplifies distributed state management. Our experience with the design and implementation of a simple distributed multiplayer game built on top of this object management framework shows that indicates that this indeed is a useful building block for distributed applications. Keywords: Range queries, Peer-to-peer systems, Distributed applications, Multiplayer games 1

One of the central tasks of networking is packet-routing when edge bandwidth is limited. Tremendous progress has been achieved by separating the issue of routing into two conceptual sub-problems: path selection and congestion resolution along the selected paths. However, this conceptual separation has a serious drawback: each packet's path is fixed at the source and cannot be modified adaptively en-route. The problem is especially severe when packet injections are modeled by an adversary, whose goal is to cause "traffic-jams".

We design a general mathematical framework to analyze the properties of nearest neighbor balancing algorithms of the diffusion type. Within this framework we develop a new optimal polynomial scheme (OPS) which we show to terminate within a finite number m of steps, where m only depends on the graph and not on the initial load distribution. We show that all existing diffusion load balancing algorithms, including OPS, determine a flow of load on the edges of the graph which is uniquely defined, independent of the method and minimal in the l 2 -norm. This result can be extended to edge weighted graphs. The l 2 -minimality is achieved only if a diffusion algorithm is used as preprocessing and the real movement of load is performed in a second step. Thus, it is advisable to split the balancing process into the two steps of first determining a balancing flow and afterwards moving the load. We introduce the problem of scheduling a flow and present some first results on its complexity and the ...

We develop a general technique for the quantitative analysis of iterative distributed load balancing schemes. We illustrate the technique by studying two simple, intuitively appealing models that are prevalent in the literature: the diffusive paradigm, and periodic balancing circuits (or the dimension exchange paradigm). It is well known that such load balancing schemes can be roughly modeled by Markov chains, but also that this approximation can be quite inaccurate. Our main contribution is an effective way of characterizing the deviation between the actual loads and the distribution generated by a related Markov chain, in terms of a natural quantity which we call the local divergence. We apply this technique to obtain bounds on the number of rounds required to achieve coarse balancing in general networks, cycles and meshes in these models. For balancing circuits, we also present bounds for the stronger requirement of perfect balancing, or counting.

Load balancing in large parallel systems with distributed memory is a difficult task often influencing the overall efficiency of applications substantially. A number of efficient distributed load balancing strategies have been developed in the recent years. Although they are currently not generally available as part of parallel operating systems, it is often not difficult to integrate them into applications. This paper gives a classification of different load balancing problems based on application characteristics. For the case of applications out of the field of scientific computing, useful methods are described in more detail.

We study the distributed averaging problem on arbitrary connected graphs, with the additional constraint that the value at each node is an integer. This discretized distributed averaging problem models several problems of interest, such as averaging in a network with finite capacity channels and load balancing in a processor network. We describe simple randomized distributed algorithms which achieve consensus to the extent that the discrete nature of the problem permits. We give bounds on the convergence time of these algorithms for fully connected networks and linear networks.

We analyze various stochastic processes for generating permutations almost uniformly at random in distributed and parallel systems. All our protocols are simple, elegant and are based on performing disjoint transpositions executed in parallel. The challenging problem of our concern is to prove that the output configurations in our processes reach almost uniform probability distribution very rapidly, i.e. in a (low) polylogarithmic time. For the analysis of the aforementioned protocols we develop a novel technique, called delayed path coupling, for proving rapid mixing of Markov chains. Our approach is an extension of the path coupling method of Bubley and Dyer. We apply delayed path coupling to three stochastic processes for generating random permutations. For one

Abstract. In the dynamic load balancing problem, we seek to keep the job load roughly evenly distributed among the processors of a given network. The arrival and departure of jobs is modeled by an adversary restricted in its power. Muthukrishnan and Rajaraman (1998) gave a clean characterization of a restriction on the adversary that can be considered the natural analogue of a cut condition. They proved that a simple local balancing algorithm proposed by Aiello et. al. (1993) is stable against such an adversary if the insertion rate is restricted to a (1 − ε) fraction of the cut size. They left as an open question whether the algorithm is stable at rate 1. In this paper, we resolve this question positively, by proving stability of the local algorithm at rate 1. Our proof techniques are very different from the ones used by Muthukrishnan and Rajaraman, and yield a simpler proof and tighter bounds on the difference in loads. In addition, we introduce a multi-commodity version of this load balancing model, and show how to extend the result to the case of balancing two different kinds of loads at once (obtaining as a corollary a new proof of the 2-commodity Max-Flow Min-Cut Theorem). We also show how to apply the proof techniques to the problem of routing packets in adversarial systems. Awerbuch et. al. (2001) showed that the same load balancing algorithm is stable against an adversary inserting

In the classical load balancing or multiprocessor scheduling problem, we are given a sequence of jobs of varying sizes and are asked to assign each job to one of the m empty processors. A typical objective is to minimize makespan, the load on the heaviest loaded processor. Since in most real world scenarios the load is a dynamic measure, the initial assignment may be not remain optimal with time. Motivated by such considerations in a variety of systems, we formulate the problem of load rebalancing --- given a possibly suboptimal assignment of jobs to processors, relocate a set of the jobs so as to decrease the makespan. Specifically, the goal is to achieve the best possible makespan under the constraint that no more than k jobs are relocated. We also consider a generalization of this problem where there is an arbitrary cost function associated with each job relocation. Since the problem is clearly NP-hard, we focus on approximation algorithms. We construct a sophisticated algorithm which achieves a 1.5-approximation, with near linear running time. We also show that the problem has a PTAS, resolving the complexity issue. Finally, we investigate the approximability of several extensions of the rebalancing model.

We study the problem of balancing the load on processors of an arbitrary network. If jobs arrive or depart during the process of load balancing, we have the dynamic load balancing problem; otherwise, we have the static load balancing problem. While static load balancing on arbitrary and special networks has been well studied, very little is known about dynamic load balancing. The difficulty lies in modeling the arrivals and departures of jobs in a clean manner. In this paper, we initiate the study of dynamic load balancing by modeling job traffic using an adversary. Our main result is that a simple, local control distributed load balancing algorithm maintains the load of the network within a stable level against this powerful adversary. Our results hold for different models of traffic patterns and processor communication. 1 Introduction An important problem in a distributed system is to balance the total workload among the various processors of the underlying system. Such load balan...