Balls into bins via local search

8^th October 2013, 16:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr. Thomas Sauerwald
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

Abstract

We study a natural process for allocating m balls (tasks) into n bins (resources) that are organized as the vertices of an undirected graph G. Balls arrive one at a time. When a ball arrives, it first chooses a vertex u in G uniformly at random. Then the ball performs a local search in G starting from u until it reaches a vertex with local minimum load, where the ball is finally placed on.Then the next ball arrives and this procedure is repeated. In this talk we derive bounds on the maximum load of this process and the time until every bin has at least one ball allocated to it.