The performance of cluster computing depends on how concurrent jobs share multiple data center resource types like CPU, RAM and disk storage. Recent research has discussed efficiency and fairness requirements and identified a number of desirable scheduling objectives including so-called dominant resource fairness (DRF). We argue here that proportional fairness (PF), long recognized as a desirable objective in sharing network bandwidth between ongoing flows, is preferable to DRF. The superiority of PF is manifest under the realistic modelling assumption that the population of jobs in progress is a stochastic process. In random traffic the strategy-proof property of DRF proves unimportant while PF is shown by analysis and simulation to offer a significantly better efficiency-fairness tradeoff.
There is an abundant literature on sharing network bandwidth. PF and, more generally, the idea that bandwidth sharing between a fixed set of flows should maximize a sum of per-flow utilities were notions introduced by Kelly al in 1998 @cite_11 . In that work, and subsequent contributions by many authors on network utility maximization, the population of flows in progress is assumed fixed. We believe this to be inappropriate, like the assumption that the population of jobs is fixed when evaluating cluster sharing. It does not make much sense to measure the utility of a flow as a function of its rate (e.g., the log function for PF) on recognizing that the population of flows in progress, and consequently the rate of any ongoing flow, changes rapidly and significantly throughout the lifetime of that flow.
@cite_11
1529132671 2161809383 2116199025 2962701284
We consider the performance of a network like the Internet handling so?called elastic traffic where the rate of flows adjusts to fill available bandwidth. Realized throughput depends both on the way bandwidth is shared and on the random nature of traffic. We assume traffic consists of point to point transfers of individual documents of finite size arriving according to a Poisson process. Notable results are that weighted sharing has limited impact on perceived quality of service and that discrimination in favour of short documents leads to considerably better performance than fair sharing. In a linear network, max---min fairness is preferable to proportional fairness under random traffic while the converse is true under the assumption of a static configuration of persistent flows. Admission control is advocated as a necessary means to maintain goodput in case of traffic overload. We discuss the relevance of fairness as a design objective for congestion control mechanisms in the Internet. Specifically, we consider a backbone network shared by a dynamic number of short-lived flows, and study the impact of bandwidth sharing on network performance. In particular, we prove that for a broad class of fair bandwidth allocations, the total number of flows in progress remains finite if the load of every link is less than one. We also show that provided the bandwidth allocation is "sufficiently" fair, performance is optimal in the sense that the throughput of the flows is mainly determined by their access rate. Neither property is guaranteed with unfair bandwidth allocations, when priority is given to one class of flow with respect to another. This suggests current proposals for a differentiated services Internet may lead to suboptimal utilization of network resources. We study in this paper a noncooperative approach for sharing resources of a common pool among users, wherein each user strives to maximize its own utility. The optimality notion is then a Nash equilibrium. First, we present a general framework of systems wherein a Nash equilibrium is Pareto inefficient, which are similar to the 'tragedy of the commons' in economics. As examples that fit in the above framework, we consider noncooperative flow-control problems in communication networks where each user decides its throughput to optimize its own utility. As such a utility, we first consider the power which is defined as the throughput divided by the expected end-to-end packet delay, and then consider another utility of additive costs. For both utilities, we establish the non-efficiency of the Nash equilibria. Abstract The performance of cluster computing depends on how concurrent jobs share multiple data center resource types such as CPU, RAM and disk storage. Recent research has discussed efficiency and fairness requirements and identified a number of desirable scheduling objectives including so-called dominant resource fairness (DRF). We argue here that proportional fairness (PF), long recognized as a desirable objective in sharing network bandwidth between ongoing data transfers, is preferable to DRF. The superiority of PF is manifest under the realistic modeling assumption that the population of jobs in progress is a stochastic process. In random traffic the strategy-proof property of DRF proves unimportant while PF is shown by analysis and simulation to offer a significantly better efficiency–fairness tradeoff.