Utility Maximizing Thread Assignment and Resource Allocation

Achieving high performance in many distributed systems, ranging from clouds to multicore processors, requires finding good assignments of threads to servers as well as effectively allocating each server's resources to its assigned threads. Both the assignment and allocation component of this problem have been studied extensively, though separately in the literature. In this paper, we introduce the \emph{assign and allocate (AA)} problem, which seeks to simultaneously find an assignment and allocations that maximize the total utility of the threads. We first show that this problem is NP-hard, even when there are only two servers. We then present a $2 (\sqrt{2}-1) > 0.828$ factor approximation algorithm, which runs in $O(mn^2 + n (\log mC)^2)$ time for $n$ threads and $m$ servers with $C$ amount of resources each. We also present a faster algorithm with the same approximation ratio and $O(n (\log mC)^2)$ running time. We conducted experiments to test the performance of our algorithm on different types of threads, and found that it achieves over 99\% of the optimal utility on average. We also compared our algorithm against several other assignment and allocation algorithms, and found that it achieves up to 5.7 times better total utility.