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Title: Configuration balancing for stochastic requests
Abstract The configuration balancing problem with stochastic requests generalizes well-studied resource allocation problems such as load balancing and virtual circuit routing. There are givenmresources andnrequests; each request has multiple possibleconfigurations, each of which increases the load of each resource by some amount. The goal is to select one configuration for each request to minimize themakespan: the load of the most-loaded resource. In the stochastic setting, the amount by which a configuration increases the resource load is uncertain until the configuration is chosen, but we are given a probability distribution. We develop both offline and online algorithms for configuration balancing with stochastic requests. When the requests are known offline, we give a non-adaptive policy for configuration balancing with stochastic requests that$$O(\frac{\log m}{\log \log m})$$ O ( log m log log m ) -approximates the optimal adaptive policy, which matches a known lower bound for the special case of load balancing on identical machines. When requests arrive online in a list, we give a non-adaptive policy that is$$O(\log m)$$ O ( log m ) competitive. Again, this result is asymptotically tight due to information-theoretic lower bounds for special cases (e.g., for load balancing on unrelated machines). Finally, we show how to leverage adaptivity in the special case of load balancing onrelatedmachines to obtain a constant-factor approximation offline and an$$O(\log \log m)$$ O ( log log m ) -approximation online. A crucial technical ingredient in all of our results is a new structural characterization of the optimal adaptive policy that allows us to limit the correlations between its decisions.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1955785 2006953 2224718
PAR ID:
10531894
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer Science + Business Media
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Mathematical Programming
Volume:
210
Issue:
1-2
ISSN:
0025-5610
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: p. 243-279
Size(s):
p. 243-279
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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