No Arabic abstract
Multiserver jobs, which are jobs that occupy multiple servers simultaneously during service, are prevalent in todays computing clusters. But little is known about the delay performance of systems with multiserver jobs. We consider queueing models for multiserver jobs in a scaling regime where the total number of servers in the system becomes large and meanwhile both the system load and the number of servers that a job needs scale with the total number of servers. Prior work has derived upper bounds on the queueing probability in this scaling regime. However, without proper lower bounds, the existing results cannot be used to differentiate between policies. In this paper, we study the delay performance by establishing sharp bounds on the mean waiting time of multiserver jobs, where the waiting time of a job is the time spent in queueing rather than in service. We first consider the commonly used First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) policy and characterize the exact order of its mean waiting time. We then prove a lower bound on the mean waiting time of all policies, and demonstrate that there is an order gap between this lower bound and the mean waiting time under FCFS. We finally complement the lower bound with an achievability result: we show that under a priority policy that we call P-Priority, the mean waiting time achieves the order of the lower bound. This achievability result implies the tightness of the lower bound, the asymptotic optimality of P-Priority, and the strict suboptimality of FCFS.
Cloud computing today is dominated by multi-server jobs. These are jobs that request multiple servers simultaneously and hold onto all of these servers for the duration of the job. Multi-server jobs add a lot of complexity to the traditional one-job-per-server model: an arrival might not fit into the available servers and might have to queue, blocking later arrivals and leaving servers idle. From a queueing perspective, almost nothing is understood about multi-server job queueing systems; even understanding the exact stability region is a very hard problem. In this paper, we investigate a multi-server job queueing model under scaling regimes where the number of servers in the system grows. Specifically, we consider a system with multiple classes of jobs, where jobs from different classes can request different numbers of servers and have different service time distributions, and jobs are served in first-come-first-served order. The multi-server job model opens up new scaling regimes where both the number of servers that a job needs and the system load scale with the total number of servers. Within these scaling regimes, we derive the first results on stability, queueing probability, and the transient analysis of the number of jobs in the system for each class. In particular we derive sufficient conditions for zero queueing. Our analysis introduces a novel way of extracting information from the Lyapunov drift, which can be applicable to a broader scope of problems in queueing systems.
The theory for multiplier empirical processes has been one of the central topics in the development of the classical theory of empirical processes, due to its wide applicability to various statistical problems. In this paper, we develop theory and tools for studying multiplier $U$-processes, a natural higher-order generalization of the multiplier empirical processes. To this end, we develop a multiplier inequality that quantifies the moduli of continuity of the multiplier $U$-process in terms of that of the (decoupled) symmetrized $U$-process. The new inequality finds a variety of applications including (i) multiplier and bootstrap central limit theorems for $U$-processes, (ii) general theory for bootstrap $M$-estimators based on $U$-statistics, and (iii) theory for $M$-estimation under general complex sampling designs, again based on $U$-statistics.
This paper provides a recipe for deriving calculable approximation errors of mean-field models in heavy-traffic with the focus on the well-known load balancing algorithm -- power-of-two-choices (Po2). The recipe combines Steins method for linearized mean-field models and State Space Concentration (SSC) based on geometric tail bounds. In particular, we divide the state space into two regions, a neighborhood near the mean-field equilibrium and the complement of that. We first use a tail bound to show that the steady-state probability being outside the neighborhood is small. Then, we use a linearized mean-field model and Steins method to characterize the generator difference, which provides the dominant term of the approximation error. From the dominant term, we are able to obtain an asymptotically-tight bound and a nonasymptotic upper bound, both are calculable bounds, not order-wise scaling results like most results in the literature. Finally, we compared the theoretical bounds with numerical evaluations to show the effectiveness of our results. We note that the simulation results show that both bounds are valid even for small size systems such as a system with only ten servers.
Blockchain systems are being used in a wide range of application domains. They can support trusted transactions in time critical applications. In this paper, we study how miners should pick up transactions from a transaction pool so as to minimize the average waiting time per transaction. We derive an expression for the average transaction waiting time of the proposed mining scheme and determine the optimum decision rule. Numerical results show that the average waiting time per transaction can be reduced by about 10% compared to the traditional no-wait scheme in which miners immediately start the next mining round using all transactions waiting in the pool.
We establish sharp criteria for the instantaneous propagation of free boundaries in solutions to the thin-film equation. The criteria are formulated in terms of the initial distribution of mass (as opposed to previous almost-optimal results), reflecting the fact that mass is a locally conserved quantity for the thin-film equation. In the regime of weak slippage, our criteria are at the same time necessary and sufficient. The proof of our upper bounds on free boundary propagation is based on a strategy of propagation of degeneracy down to arbitrarily small spatial scales: We combine estimates on the local mass and estimates on energies to show that degeneracy on a certain space-time cylinder entails degeneracy on a spatially smaller space-time cylinder with the same time horizon. The derivation of our lower bounds on free boundary propagation is based on a combination of a monotone quantity and almost optimal estimates established previously by the second author with a new estimate connecting motion of mass to entropy production.