TY - JOUR

T1 - Load Balancing in Compute Clusters With Delayed Feedback

AU - Tahir, Anam

AU - Alt, Bastian

AU - Rizk, Amr

AU - Koeppl, Heinz

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 1968-2012 IEEE.

PY - 2023/6/1

Y1 - 2023/6/1

N2 - Load balancing arises as a fundamental problem, underlying the dimensioning and operation of many computing and communication systems, such as job routing in data center clusters, multipath communication, Big Data and queueing systems. In essence, the decision-making agent maps each arriving job to one of the possibly heterogeneous servers while aiming at an optimization goal such as load balancing, low average delay or low loss rate. One main difficulty in finding optimal load balancing policies here is that the agent only partially observes the impact of its decisions, e.g., through the delayed acknowledgements of the served jobs. In this paper, we provide a partially observable (PO) model that captures the load balancing decisions in parallel buffered systems under limited information of delayed acknowledgements. We present a simulation model for this PO system to find a load balancing policy in real-time using a scalable Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. We numerically show that the resulting policy outperforms other limited information load balancing strategies such as variants of Join-the-Most-Observations and has comparable performance to full information strategies like: Join-the-Shortest-Queue, Join-the-Shortest-Queue(d) and Shortest-Expected-Delay. Finally, we show that our approach can optimise the real-time parallel processing by using network data provided by Kaggle.

AB - Load balancing arises as a fundamental problem, underlying the dimensioning and operation of many computing and communication systems, such as job routing in data center clusters, multipath communication, Big Data and queueing systems. In essence, the decision-making agent maps each arriving job to one of the possibly heterogeneous servers while aiming at an optimization goal such as load balancing, low average delay or low loss rate. One main difficulty in finding optimal load balancing policies here is that the agent only partially observes the impact of its decisions, e.g., through the delayed acknowledgements of the served jobs. In this paper, we provide a partially observable (PO) model that captures the load balancing decisions in parallel buffered systems under limited information of delayed acknowledgements. We present a simulation model for this PO system to find a load balancing policy in real-time using a scalable Monte Carlo tree search algorithm. We numerically show that the resulting policy outperforms other limited information load balancing strategies such as variants of Join-the-Most-Observations and has comparable performance to full information strategies like: Join-the-Shortest-Queue, Join-the-Shortest-Queue(d) and Shortest-Expected-Delay. Finally, we show that our approach can optimise the real-time parallel processing by using network data provided by Kaggle.

KW - Parallel systems

KW - load balancing

KW - partial observability

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85140789519&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/TC.2022.3215907

DO - 10.1109/TC.2022.3215907

M3 - Article

VL - 72

SP - 1610

EP - 1622

JO - IEEE transactions on computers

JF - IEEE transactions on computers

SN - 0018-9340

IS - 6

ER -