Balanced stream assignment for service facility

Abstract

Shared data centers and clouds are gaining popularity because of their ability to reduce costs by increasing the utilization of server farms. In a shared server environment, a careful assignment of workload streams (all work-requests from a customer may constitute a stream) to servers is necessary to ensure good "end user" performance. In this work, we investigate the assignment of streams to servers in order to minimize an objective function, while ensuring that load is balanced across all the servers. The objective functions we optimize in this work include the overall expected waiting-time, overall probability of the wait exceeding a given value, and weighted versions of these measures. We obtain the optimal algorithm for a farm with 2 servers, if sharing of streams among servers is allowed. Based on the insights obtained, we design an efficient algorithm for the multi-server case. By rounding off this solution, we obtain a solution to the case where sharing of streams is not allowed. Our trace-driven evaluation study shows that our algorithms significantly outperform baseline methods. Our work enables high performance for web hosting services as well as emerging Application as a Service (AaaS) clouds. We also show that solutions in areas such as task-level scheduling and file assignment fall within our framework. ©2010 IEEE.