The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.Abstract. Suppose that a set of m tasks are to be shared as equally as possible among a set of n resources. A game-theoretic mechanism to find a suitable allocation is to associate each task with a "selfish agent" and require each agent to select a resource, with the cost of a resource being the number of agents that select it. Agents would then be expected to migrate from overloaded to underloaded resources, until the allocation becomes balanced. Recent work has studied the question of how this can take place within a distributed setting in which agents migrate selfishly without any centralized control. In this paper we discuss a natural protocol for the agents which combines the following desirable features: It can be implemented in a strongly distributed setting, uses no central control, and has good convergence properties. For m n, the system becomes approximately balanced (an -Nash equilibrium) in expected time O(log log m). We show using a martingale technique that the process converges to a perfectly balanced allocation in expected time O(log log m + n 4 ). We also give a lower bound of Ω(max{log log m, n}) for the convergence time.

In this paper we consider the following scenario. A set of n jobs with different threads is being run concurrently. Each job has an associated weight, which gives the proportion of processor time that it should be allocated. In a single time quantum, p threads of (not necessarily distinct) jobs receive one unit of service, and we require a rule that selects those p threads, at each quantum. Proportionate fairness means that over time, each job will have received an amount of service that is proportional to its weight. That aim cannot be achieved exactly due to the discretisation of service provision, but we can still hope to bound the extent to which service allocation deviates from its target. It is important that any scheduling rule be simple since the rule will be used frequently.We consider a variant of the Surplus Fair Scheduling (SFS) algorithm of Chandra, Adler, Goyal, and Shenoy. Our variant, which is appropriate for scenarios where jobs consist of multiple threads, retains the properties that make SFS empirically attractive but allows the first proof of proportionate fairness in a multiprocessor context. We show that when the variant is run, no job lags more than pH(n) − p +1 steps below its target number of services, where H(n) is the Harmonic function. Also, no job is over-supplied by more than O(1) extra services. This analysis is tight and it also extends to an adversarial setting, which models some situations in which the relative weights of jobs change over time.

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Abstract. We consider the problem of resource allocation in a parallel environment where new incoming resources are arriving online in groups or batches. We study this scenario in an abstract framework of allocating balls into bins. We revisit the allocation algorithm GREEDY[2] due to Azar, Broder, Karlin, and Upfal (SIAM J. Comput. 1999), in which, for sequentially arriving balls, each ball chooses two bins at random, and gets placed into one of those two bins with minimum load. The maximum load of any bin after the last ball is allocated by GREEDY[2] is well understood, as is, indeed, the entire load distribution, for a wide range of settings. The main goal of our paper is to study balls and bins allocation processes in a parallel environment with the balls arriving in batches. In our model, m balls arrive in batches of size n each (with n being also equal to the number of bins), and the balls in each batch are to be distributed among the bins simultaneously. In this setting, we consider an algorithm that uses GREEDY [2] for all balls within a given batch, the answers to those balls' load queries are with respect to the bin loads at the end of the previous batch, and do not in any way depend on decisions made by other balls from the same batch. Our main contribution is a tight analysis of the new process allocating balls in batches: we show that after the allocation of any number of batches, the gap between maximum and minimum load is O(log n) with high probability, and is therefore independent of the number of batches used.

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