An adaptive threshold-based policy for sharing servers with affinities

Abstract: "We evaluate the performance of threshold-based job allocation policies in a heterogeneous distributed computing system, where servers may have different speeds, and jobs may have different service demands, importance, and/or affinities for different servers. We find that while threshold-based policies typically yield low mean response time, these policies are not robust with respect to fluctuations or misprediction of the load. We propose a new adaptive dual-threshold policy and show that this policy yields low mean response time while also being robust.