Title:

Randomized Load Balancing: the queue at the cavity at work

Abstract:

Randomized load balancing algorithms in large-scale computing systems have received a lot of attention in the last few years. In this seminar we illustrate that the performance of many of these algorithms can be accessed using "the queue at the cavity approach". This approach is an approximation method that is known to yield exact results in the large-system limit in some particular cases. Apart from illustrating how this approach works on a number of algorithms, we also touch upon some open problems in this area.

Short Bio:

Benny Van Houdt is a professor at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), where he also obtained his Phd in 2001. He has been a post-doctoral fellow of the FWO-Flanders from October 2001 until October 2007. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Performance Evaluation journal (since Jan 2018), a senior associate editor of ACM ToMPECS (since 2014) and an editorial board member of Stochastic Models (since 2016). He has been a member of the editorial board of Operations Research Letters (2007-2017) and Performance Evaluation (2011-2017).

Benny is the (co)recipient of various awards including best paper awards at ACM Sigmetrics, IFIP Performance, ITC, QEST and Valuetools. He is an elected member and officer of the IFIP working group 7.3 on Computer System Modeling and has published papers in a variety of journals such as IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, Communications, IEEE JSAC, IEEE/OSA JOCN, Performance Evaluation, QUESTA, Journal of Applied Probability, Adv. In Applied Probability, Operations Research Letters, INFORMS JOC, EJOR, Stochastic Models, Computer Networks, Naval Research Logistics, etc.