Wide area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Exploiting process lifetime distributions for dynamic load balancing
Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Generating representative Web workloads for network and server performance evaluation
SIGMETRICS '98/PERFORMANCE '98 Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Data networks as cascades: investigating the multifractal nature of Internet WAN traffic
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
Load-balancing heuristics and process behavior
SIGMETRICS '86/PERFORMANCE '86 Proceedings of the 1986 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Computer performance modelling, measurement and evaluation
IP packet generation: statistical models for TCP start times based on connection-rate superposition
Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
On choosing a task assignment policy for a distributed server system
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing - Special issue on software support for distributed computing
Statistical bandwidth sharing: a study of congestion at flow level
Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Task assignment with unknown duration
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
New bounds for expected delay in FIFO GI/GI/c queues
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
The M/G/c queue in light traffic
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
The impact of a heavy-tailed service-time distribution upon the M/GI/s waiting-time distribution
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Approximations for the delay probability in the M/G/s queue
Mathematical and Computer Modelling: An International Journal
How many servers are best in a dual-priority M/PH/k system?
Performance Evaluation
NPC '08 Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing
Surprising results on task assignment in server farms with high-variability workloads
Proceedings of the eleventh international joint conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
ACSC '09 Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Australasian Conference on Computer Science - Volume 91
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The heavy-tailed nature of Internet flow sizes, web pages and computer files can cause non-preemptive scheduling policies to have a large average response time. Since there are numerous communication and distributed processing systems where preempting jobs can be quite expensive, reducing response times under this constraint is a pressing issue. One proposal for tackling non-preemption is through the use of multiple servers: classify jobs according to size and assign a server to each class. Unfortunately, in most systems of interest, job sizes are unknown. An alterative is to queue all jobs together in a central-queue and assign them in a FCFS fashion to the next available server. But, this has been believed to yield large response times. In this paper, we argue that this is not the case, so long as there are enough servers. The question then is: what is the right number of servers, and is this small enough to be practical? Despite the large amount of prior work in analyzing the behavior of a central-queue system, no existing models are accurate for the case of heavy-tailed size distributions. Our main contribution is a simple yet accurate model for a central-queue with multiple servers. This model accurately predicts the right number of servers, and the average and variance of the response time of the system. Hence, it can be used to improve the performance of some real systems, such as multi-server supercomputing centers and multi-channel communication systems.