Combinatorial Optimization Reading Group - Rian Neogi

Title: Stochastic Load Balancing on Unrelated Machines

Abstract: We will take a look at the stochastic load balancing problem. The goal is to assign tasks to machines, so that the maximum amount of time taken by any machine to complete all its assigned tasks is minimized. The stochastic twist to this problem is that now the time required to complete each task is a random variable sampled from some known distribution. For the stochastic version, we need to minimize the maximum time taken by any machine in expectation. We will look at a constant factor approximation algorithm for this problem that appeared in a recent paper by Gupta, Kumar, Nagarajan and Shen.