We introduce a general framework for the mean-field analysis of large-scale load-balancing networks with general service distributions. Specifically, we consider a parallel server network that consists of N queues and operates under the $SQ(d)$ load balancing policy, wherein jobs have independent and identical service requirements and each incoming job is routed on arrival to the shortest of $d$ queues that are sampled uniformly at random from $N$ queues. We introduce a novel state representation and, for a large class of arrival processes, including renewal and time-inhomogeneous Poisson arrivals, and mild assumptions on the service distribution, show that the mean-field limit, as $N rightarrow infty$, of the state can be characterized as the unique solution of a sequence of coupled partial integro-differential equations, which we refer to as the hydrodynamic PDE. We use a numerical scheme to solve the PDE to obtain approximations to the dynamics of large networks and demonstrate the efficacy of these approximations using Monte Carlo simulations. We also illustrate how the PDE can be used to gain insight into network performance.
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