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Strategy-Proof Mechanism for Online Time-Varying Resource Allocation with Restart

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Abstract

Time-varying resource allocation in which the resource requirements of a job can vary over time is a new challenge in cloud computing. Time-varying resource allocation can be combined with an auction mechanism to improve the social welfare of resource providers. However, existing research results are based on fixed resource requirements and consequently cannot be used in time-varying resource allocation. This paper proposes a creative integer programming model for time-varying resource allocation problems and designs a strategy-proof online auction mechanism that allows jobs to be scheduled in a preemptive-restart mode. The advantage of this approach is that it can respond to high-priority jobs in a timely manner while still executing low-priority jobs with the restart mode. For the resource allocation and scheduling algorithm, we propose dynamic priority based on the dominant resource proportion and valid active time to improve social welfare and resource utilization. Furthermore, we present a payment pricing algorithm based on critical value theory. Finally, we prove that our proposed mechanism is strategy-proof. Our approach is experimentally compared with existing algorithms in terms of execution time, social welfare, resource utilization and job completion ratio.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank IBM for providing a full version of CPLEX12 that does not set limitations on solving for optimal solutions. We thank the Alibaba Global Scheduling Algorithm Contest for providing the raw time-varying resource allocation dataset. This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61762091, 62062065 and 11663007), the Project of the Natural Science Foundation of Yunnan Province of China (No. 2019FB142 and 2018ZF017), the Scientific Research Foundation of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education (2017ZZX228), and the Program for Excellent Young Talents, Yunnan University, China.

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Correspondence to Weidong Li.

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Zhang, J., Xie, N., Zhang, X. et al. Strategy-Proof Mechanism for Online Time-Varying Resource Allocation with Restart. J Grid Computing 19, 25 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-021-09563-1

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