MARO - MinDrift affinity routing for resource management in heterogeneous computing systems

This paper deals with designing effective resource management strategies for systems of heterogeneous computers. Each computer is represented as an abstract server, capable of serving different task demands at different rates. We consider a system with I types of independent Poisson task demand arrival streams and J parallel servers with independent non-identical processing time distributions for each arrival type. The decision of routing each type i task immediately upon arrival to a server j is made by comparing the state information of a subset of the J servers. We show that choosing the subset according to a linear programming (LP) problem which maximizes the system capacity can not only significantly reduce the amount of state information required in making the routing decision, but also yield shorter total mean queue length (and hence mean time in system) compared with the policies requiring global state information. In addition, we explore means of limiting flexibility to further reduce the required state information.