Rebudget: Trading Off Efficiency Vs. Fairness In Market-Based Multicore Resource Allocation Via Runtime Budget Reassignment

Efficiently allocating shared resources in computer systems is critical to optimizing execution. Recently, a number of market-based solutions have been proposed to attack this problem. Some of them provide provable theoretical bounds to efficiency and/or fairness losses under market equilibrium. However, they are limited to markets with potentially important constraints, such as enforcing equal budget for all players, or curve-fitting players' utility into a specific function type. Moreover, they do not generally provide an intuitive "knob" to control efficiency vs. fairness.In this paper, we introduce two new metrics, Market Utility Range (MUR) and Market Budget Range (MBR), through which we provide for the first time theoretical bounds on efficiency and fairness of market equilibria under arbitrary budget assignments. We leverage this result and propose ReBudget, an iterative budget re-assignment algorithm that can be used to control efficiency vs. fairness at run-time. We apply our algorithm to a multi-resource allocation problem in multicore chips. Our evaluation using detailed execution-driven simulations shows that our budget re-assignment technique is intuitive, effective, and efficient.