Computable Bounds in Fork-Join Queueing Systems
Amr Rizk, Felix Poloczek, Florin Ciucu · 2015
In a Fork-Join (FJ) queueing system an upstream fork station splits incoming jobs into N tasks to be further processed by N parallel servers, each with its own queue; the response time of one job is determined, at a downstream join station, by the maximum of the corresponding tasks' response times. This queueing system is useful to the modelling of multi-service systems subject to synchronization constraints, such as MapReduce clusters or multipath routing. Despite their apparent simplicity, FJ systems are hard to analyze.