Speed Scaling with Multiple Servers Under A Sum Power Constraint

Abstract: The problem of scheduling jobs and choosing their respective speeds with multiple servers under a sum power constraint to minimize the flow time + energy is considered. This problem is a generalization of the flow time minimization problem with multiple unit-speed servers, when jobs can be parallelized, however, with a sub-linear, concave speedup function $k^{1/\alpha}, \alpha>1$ when allocated $k$ servers, i.e., jobs experience diminishing returns from being allocated additional servers. When all jobs are available at time $0$, we show that a very simple algorithm EQUI, that processes all available jobs at the same speed is $$\left(2-\frac{1}{\alpha}\right) \frac{2}{\left(1-\left(\frac{1}{\alpha}\right)\right)}$$-competitive, while in the general case, when jobs arrive over time, an LCFS based algorithm is shown to have a constant (dependent only on $\alpha$) competitive ratio.