Sharp Waiting-Time Bounds for Multiserver Jobs

TL;DR

This paper derives sharp bounds on the mean waiting time for multiserver jobs in large-scale systems, characterizing the performance of FCFS and proposing a policy that achieves the lower bound.

Contribution

It establishes the exact order of mean waiting time under FCFS, provides a lower bound for all policies, and introduces SNF policy that attains this bound.

Findings

Exact order of mean waiting time under FCFS.

Lower bound on mean waiting time for all policies.

SNF policy achieves the lower bound.

Abstract

Multiserver jobs, which are jobs that occupy multiple servers simultaneously during service, are prevalent in today's computing clusters. But little is known about the delay performance of systems with multiserver jobs. We consider queueing models for multiserver jobs in scaling regimes where the system load becomes heavy and meanwhile the total number of servers in the system and the number of servers that a job needs become large. 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 characterize the exact order of the mean waiting time under the First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) policy. Then we prove a lower bound on the mean waiting time of all policies, which has an order gap with the mean waiting time under FCFS. Finally, we show that the lower bound is achievable under a priority policy that we call Smallest-Need-First (SNF).