Thursday, February 11, 2010

Lecture 11: Load balancing games

Today we looked at our first CSy games -- load balancing games.  These games are motivated by the fact that a data center / server farm is simply too big to optimally assign jobs, so instead we could consider just using a greedy heuristic of sending jobs to the best server they can go.  Well, this algorithm can be viewed as a game where the players are the jobs...and we spent the lecture starting the analysis of this game.  We've seen so far that Nash equilibria always exist and that the optimal assignment is always an equilibrium.  Next class we'll look at how bad equilibria can be, and then we'll move on to routing games.

My notes include everything for the next lecture too, so I won't post them yet. 

Also, remember that Monday is a holiday, so we won't have lecture again until Wednesday.

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