PhD Defense Mark van der Boor
On March 26th 2021, Mark van der Boor will defend his PhD thesis titled 'Hyper-Scalable Load Balancing'.
Mark's promotors are Sem Borst (TU/e) and Johan van Leeuwaarden (Tilburg University and TU/e).
The defense will take place in the Auditorium at TU/e and can be followed online starting at 4PM.
Abstract
Scalable load balancing algorithms (LBAs) achieve excellent delay performance in large-scale systems and yet only involve low implementation overhead. LBAs play a critical role in distributing service requests or tasks (e.g. compute jobs, data base lookups, file transfers) among servers or distributed resources in parallel-processing systems. The analysis and design of LBAs has attracted strong attention in recent years, mainly spurred by crucial scalability challenges arising in cloud networks and data centers with massive numbers of servers handling a huge influx of service requests. The use of state information naturally allows dynamic LBAs to achieve better delay performance, but also involves higher implementation complexity and a substantial communication burden.
Motivated by these issues, we introduce and analyze novel scalable LBAs which strike an optimal trade-off between performance and communication overhead. Specifically, LBAs are referred to as `hyper-scalable’ when they operate below the minimum requirement for vanishing delay in a many-server regime, referred to as the hyper-scalable operating region. Mathematical techniques such as queueing networks and fluid limits will be used for the analysis of these LBAs, and extensive simulation experiments are conducted to illustrate the results.
You can read the thesis here.
