Distributed Load Balancing: A New Framework and Improved Guarantees

Authors Sara Ahmadian, Allen Liu, Binghui Peng, Morteza Zadimoghaddam



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Sara Ahmadian
  • Google Research, New York, NY, USA
Allen Liu
  • MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
Binghui Peng
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Morteza Zadimoghaddam
  • Google Research, Cambridge, MA, USA

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Sara Ahmadian, Allen Liu, Binghui Peng, and Morteza Zadimoghaddam. Distributed Load Balancing: A New Framework and Improved Guarantees. In 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 185, pp. 79:1-79:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.79

Abstract

Inspired by applications on search engines and web servers, we consider a load balancing problem with a general convex objective function. In this problem, we are given a bipartite graph on a set of sources S and a set of workers W and the goal is to distribute the load from each source among its neighboring workers such that the total load of workers are as balanced as possible. We present a new distributed algorithm that works with any symmetric non-decreasing convex function for evaluating the balancedness of the workers' load. Our algorithm computes a nearly optimal allocation of loads in O(log n log² d/ε³) rounds where n is the number of nodes, d is the maximum degree, and ε is the desired precision. If the objective is to minimize the maximum load, we modify the algorithm to obtain a nearly optimal solution in O(log n log d/ε²) rounds. This improves a line of algorithms that require a polynomial number of rounds in n and d and appear to encounter a fundamental barrier that prevents them from obtaining poly-logarithmic runtime [Berenbrink et al., 2005; Berenbrink et al., 2009; Subramanian and Scherson, 1994; Rabani et al., 1998]. In our paper, we introduce a novel primal-dual approach with multiplicative weight updates that allows us to circumvent this barrier. Our algorithm is inspired by [Agrawal et al., 2018] and other distributed algorithms for optimizing linear objectives but introduces several new twists to deal with general convex objectives.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • Load balancing
  • Distributed algorithms

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