Communication-Aware Scheduling of Serial Tasks for Dispersed Computing

Abstract: There is a growing interest in development of in-network dispersed computing paradigms that leverage the computing capabilities of heterogeneous resources dispersed across the network for processing massive amount of data is collected at the edge of the network. We consider the problem of task scheduling for such networks, in a dynamic setting in which arriving computation jobs are modeled as chains, with nodes representing tasks, and edges representing precedence constraints among tasks. In our proposed model, motivated by significant communication costs in dispersed computing environments, the communication times are taken into account. More specifically, we consider a network where servers are capable of serving all task types, and sending the results of processed tasks from one server to another server results in some communication delay that makes the design of optimal scheduling policy significantly more challenging than classical queueing networks. As the main contributions of the paper, we first characterize the capacity region of the network, then propose a novel virtual queueing network encoding the state of the network. Finally, we propose a Max-Weight type scheduling policy, and considering the virtual queueing network in the fluid limit, we use a Lyapunov argument to show that the policy is throughput-optimal.