Article ID: | iaor19991504 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 563 |
End Page Number: | 573 |
Publication Date: | Jul 1998 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Righter Rhonda, Liu Zhen |
Keywords: | programming: dynamic |
We consider optimal load balancing in a distributed computing environment consisting of homogeneous unreliable processors. Each processor receives its own sequence of tasks from outside users, some of which can be redirected to the other processors. Processing times are independent and identically distributed with an arbitrary distribution. The arrival sequence of outside tasks to each processor may be arbitrary as long as it is independent of the state of the system. Processors may fail, with arbitrary failure and repair processes that are also independent of the state of the system. The only information available to a processor is the history of its decisions for routing work to other processors, and the arrival times of its own arrival sequence. We prove the optimality of the round-robin policy, in which each processor sends all the tasks that can be redirected to each of the other processors in turn. We show that, among all policies that balanced workload, round robin stochastically minimizes the