Dynamic task assignment in server farms: better performance by task grouping

This paper describes a dynamic load balancing approach to distributed server farm systems. This approach overcomes the interference caused by non-negligible very large tasks in the heavy-tailed distribution. First, a subset of tasks is allocated proportionally to the processing capability of participating servers by taking into account their remaining processing time. Later, tasks in the servers are processed in order of priority to optimise the system response time. The proposed load balancing algorithm also takes into account the information on server loads to avoid load imbalance caused by very large tasks. The experiments show that the mean waiting time and the mean slowdown time are reduced at the server farm system.