Distributed Processor Scheduling and User Countermeasures
Amnon B. Barak, Peter J. Downey · SIAM Journal on Computing · 1981
Consider an m-processor distributed system having both local node and network traffic. Because users have incomplete information about the state of the queues at remote nodes, they can be tempted to shorten the expected completion time of a job by running multiple incarnations of each task in parallel on all m processors. To assess the temptation of such a “user countermeasure,” a job consisting of a sequence of n tasks to be performed sequentially is considered. Under simple assumptions about execution and network times, users can cut their expected job completion time by a factor of the square root of m. The implications of such user countermeasures on system design are discussed.