Coordination mechanisms for decentralized parallel systems

On resource sharing platforms, the execution of the jobs submitted by users is usually controlled by a centralized global scheduler. It determines efficient schedules regarding some common objective function that all organizations agree with (for instance, maximizing the utilization of the entire platform). However, in practice each organization is mostly interested in the performance obtained for its own jobs. We study the price that the collectivity must pay in order to allow independence to selfish, self-governing organizations, so they can choose the best schedules for their own jobs. In other words, we are interested in analyzing the costs on the global performance inflicted by the decentralization of scheduling policies. We present a game-theoretic model for the problem and the associated coordination mechanisms developed to reduce the cost of the decentralization of the decision-making process. The main contribution is to show (in theory and practice) how to devise pure Nash equilibria configurations for every instance of the problem and to prove that the price payed by the collectivity depends on the local scheduling policy and on the characteristics of the workload executed on such platforms. Copyright c © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.