COMP9334 Project, Priority queueing for multi-phase jobs
1 Introduction and learning objectives

When you were learning about operational analysis earlier in the term, we talked about jobs that require multiple visits to the CPU (or servers) to receive their service. In this project, you will use simulation to study how priority queueing can be used to improve the performance of a multiserver system that works on jobs that require multiple visits to the servers.

In this project, you will learn:

To use discrete event simulation to simulate a computer system
To use simulation to solve a design problem
To use statistically sound methods to analyse simulation outputs
2 Support provided and computing resources

If you have problems doing this project, you can post your question on the course forum. We strongly encourage you to do this as asking questions and trying to answer them is a great way to learn. Do not be afraid that your question may appear to be silly, the other students may very well have the same question! Please note that if your forum post shows part of your solution or code, you must mark that forum post private.

Another way to get help is to attend a consultation (see the Timetable section of the course website for dates and times).

3 Multi-server system confifiguration and job characteristics

for this project

The confifiguration of the system that you will use in this project is shown in Figure 1. The system consists of a dispatcher and n servers where n > 1. The dispatcher has two queues: a high priority queue and a low priority queue. You can assume that both queues have infifinite queueing slots. You have not learnt about priority queues yet but the following description will explain how priority queues are used.

We will use the word job to refer to a request that requires service from this system. A job may require one or more visits to the servers in order to get all its work completed. These visits of a job take place one after another with a possible time gap between two consecutive visits. Jobs in this system do not use parallel processing so each job does not use more than one server at a time.

We will now explain how this system handles a new job. When a new job (i.e., an external arrival) arrives at the system, the dispatcher will send the job to any one of the idle servers if there is at least one idle server. If all the servers are busy, the dispatcher will place this job at the end of the high priority queue.

After a job has completed a visit to the server, the job either requires or does not require further visits to the servers. If the job does not require further visits to the servers, then the job will depart from the system permanently. If the job requires further visits to the servers, then the job will be sent back to the dispatcher. We will use the term re-circulated jobs to refer to those jobs that are sent back to the dispatcher from the servers because these jobs require further visits to the servers.

A job that arrives at the dispatcher can either be a new job or a re-circulated job, see Figure

We have already explained how the dispatcher handles new jobs. We will start to describe how the dispatcher handles the re-circulated jobs. Since the dispatcher handles all re-circulated jobs in the same way, the procedure therefore applies to a generic re-circulated job. We fifirst need to defifine some notation. First, when a re-circulated job arrives at the dispatcher, the job can have completed 1, 2, 3 or more visits to the servers. We will use c to denote the number of completed server visits when a re-circulated job arrives at the dispatcher. Second, the dispatcher uses a threshold h, which is an integer bigger than or equal to 1, to decide on whether an arriving recirculated job should be considered a high or low priority job. Now we have defifined the notation,we can state the rule that the dispatcher uses: When a re-circulated job arrives at the dispatcher,the dispatcher will classify this job as low priority if its value of c is greater than or equal to h;otherwise the job is a high priority job. Let us consider an example.
Example 1 In this example, we assume the threshold h has a value of 2. Let us consider a job which requires altogether 3 server visits before it will permanently depart from the system. So, this job will re-circulate to the dispatcher two times: once with a value of c = 1 and the other with c = 2.

When this job re-circulates to the dispatcher the fifirst time, its value of c will be 1. Since c ≥ h does not hold, the dispatcher will consider this job as a high priority job on this occasion.
The second time that this job re-circulates to the dispatcher, its value of c will be 2. Since c ≥ h holds, the dispatcher will consider this job as a low priority job on this occasion.
We have now explained how the dispatcher classififies an arriving re-circulated job into either a high or low priority job. We have yet to explain the detailed working of the dispatcher. We will do that together with the description of how departures are handled. This is because the arrival of a re-circulated job at a dispatcher follows the job’s earlier departure from a server, see Figure

The following steps describe how a job, which has completed a server visit, will be handled.
For ease of referral, we will use the term tagged job to refer to this job that has just completed its server visit.

The tagged job is considered to be a permanent departure if the number of complete visits that it has already made is equal to the total number of visits that this job requires. If the tagged job is not a permanent departure, then it will be re-circulated to the dispatcher. The server that was working on the tagged job would send a message to the dispatcher to inform it that it is available to serve another job.
If the tagged job is a re-circulated job, then it will be sent to the dispatcher which will classify it into either a high or low priority job using the values of c and h as described earlier. The dispatcher will then place the tagged job at the end of the appropriate queue.
The dispatcher is aware that a server has just completed a visit of a job and is available to process another job. The dispatcher executes the following:
– If the high priority queue is non-empty, then the job at the head of the high priority queue will be sent to the available server for processing.

– If the high priority queue is empty and the low priority queue is non-empty, then the job at the head of the low priority queue will be sent to the available server for processing.

– If both high and low priority queues are empty, then the dispatcher does not need to do anything. The server that has just been made available will go idle.

We remark that the above description means that the dispatcher uses the non-preemptive queueing discipline. We will be discussing queueing disciplines in Week 7 and you can read about it on p.500 of [1]. However, the above description should be enough for you to get your project going now even before we discuss priority queues in Week 7.

We make the following assumptions on the system in Figure 1. First, it takes the dispatcher negligible time to process a job, to classify a job and to send a job to an available server. Second,it takes a negligible time for a server to send a re-circulated job to the dispatcher and to inform the dispatcher on its availability. As a consequence of these assumptions, it means that: (1) If a job arriving at the dispatcher is to be sent to an available server right away, then its arrival time at the dispatcher is the same as its arrival time at the chosen server; (2) The departure time of a job from the dispatcher is the same as its arrival time at the chosen server; and (3) The departure time of a re-circulated job from a server is the same as its arrival time at the dispatcher. Ultimately,these assumptions imply that the response time of the system depends only on the queues and the servers.

We have now completed our description of the operation of the system in Figure 1. We will provide a number of numerical examples to further explain its operation in Section 4.

You will see from the numerical examples in Section 4 that the threshold h can be used to inflfluence the system’s mean response time. So, a design problem that you will consider in this project is to determine the value of the threshold h to minimise the mean response time of the system. You can read in [1] how priority queueing can be used to reduce the mean response time of computer systems.

Remark 1 This project is inspired by a recent work [2] which studies how priority queueing can be used to improve the performance of a multi-server system that provide service to multi-phase jobs.

A multi-phase job also requires multiple visit to the servers in order to get its work done. However, the multi-phase job in [2] will sometimes require only the service of a server but sometimes it may require a number of servers in parallel. In order to make this project more do-able, we have simplifified many of the settings in [2]. For example, we do not use preemptive queueing, processor sharing and parallel servers.

4 Examples

We will now present two examples to illustrate the operation of the system that you will simulate in this project. In all these examples, we assume that the system is initially empty.

4.1 Example 1: number of servers n = 2 and threshold h = 1

In this example, we assume the there are n = 2 servers in the system and the threshold h for determining whether a re-circulated job is of low or high priority is 1.

In this example, each job requires one or two visits to the servers before it permanently departs from the system. Table 1 shows, for each job, its arrival time and the service times for its visits. If there is only one service time in the third column in Table 1, then it means the job only requires one server visit. If there are two service times, then the job requires two server visits. For example,Job 1 in Table 1 requires two visits where the fifirst and second visits require, respectively, 3 and 10 time units of service times. As another example, Job 3 requires only one visit and the service time required for that visit is 6 time units.