The Multiserver Job Queuing Model with big and small jobs: Stability in the case of infinite servers

Abstract

The Multiserver Job Queuing Model (MJQM) is a queuing system that plays a key role in the study of the dynamics of resource allocation in data centers. The MJQM comprises a waiting line with infinite capacity and a large number of servers. In this paper, we look at the limiting case in which the number of servers is infinite. Jobs are termed “multiserver” because each one is characterized by a resource demand in terms of number of simultaneously used servers and by a service duration. Job classes are defined by collecting all jobs that require the same number of servers. Job service times are independent and identically distributed random variables whose distributions depend on the class of the job. We consider the case of only two job classes: “small” jobs use a fixed number of servers, while “big” jobs use all servers in the system. The service discipline is First-In First-Out (FIFO). This means that if the job at the Head-of-Line (HOL) cannot enter service because the number of free servers is not sufficient to meet the job requirement, it blocks all subsequent jobs, even if there are sufficient free servers for them. Despite its importance, only few results exist for the MJQM, whose analysis is challenging, especially because the MJQM is not work-conserving. This implies that even the stability region of the MJQM is known only in special cases. In a previous work, we obtained a closed-form stability condition for MJQM with big and small jobs under the assumption of exponentially distributed service times for small jobs. In this paper, we compute the stability condition of MJQM with an infinite number of servers processing big and small jobs, considering different distributions of the service times of small jobs. Simulations are used to support the analytical results and to investigate the impact of service time distributions on the average job waiting time before saturation.