Abstract

In recent years the task of allocating jobs to servers has been studied with the "balls and bins" abstraction. Results in this area exploit the large decrease in maximum load that can be achieved by allowing each job (ball) a very small amount of choice in choosing its destination server (bin). The scenarios considered can be divided into two categories: sequential, where each job can be placed at a server before the next job arrives, and parallel, where the jobs arrive in large batches that must be dealt with simultaneously. Another, orthogonal, classification of load balancing scenarios is into fixed time and infinite. Fixed time processes are only analyzed for an interval of time that is known in advance, and for all such results thus far either the number of rounds or the total expected number of arrivals at each server is a constant. In the infinite case, there is an arrival process and a deletion process that are both defined over an infinite time line. In this pape...

Citations