Capacity Analysis of Distributed Computing Systems with Multiple Resource Types

Abstract

In cloud and edge computing systems, computation, communication, and memory resources are distributed across different physical machines and can be used to execute computational tasks requested by different users. It is challenging to characterize the capacity of such a distributed system, because there exist multiple types of resources and the amount of resources required by different tasks is random. In this paper, we define the capacity as the number of tasks that the system can support with a given overload/outage probability. We derive theoretical formulas for the capacity of distributed systems with multiple resource types, where we consider the power of d choices as the task scheduling strategy in the analysis. Our analytical results describe the capacity of distributed computing systems, which can be used for planning purposes or assisting the scheduling and admission decisions of tasks to various resources in the system. Simulation results using both synthetic and real-world data are also presented to validate the capacity bounds.