Affinity Scheduling and the Applications on Data Center Scheduling with Data Locality

Abstract: MapReduce framework is the de facto standard in Hadoop. Considering the data locality in data centers, the load balancing problem of map tasks is a special case of affinity scheduling problem. There is a huge body of work on affinity scheduling, proposing heuristic algorithms which try to increase data locality in data centers like Delay Scheduling and Quincy. However, not enough attention has been put on theoretical guarantees on throughput and delay optimality of such algorithms. In this work, we present and compare different algorithms and discuss their shortcoming and strengths. To the best of our knowledge, most data centers are using static load balancing algorithms which are not efficient in any ways and results in wasting the resources and causing unnecessary delays for users.