A Cost-Aware Fair Allocation Mechanism for Multi-Resource Servers

We propose a cost-aware measure to establish fair-sharing of multi-resource/heterogeneous servers among multiple users. Each server attributes a virtual cost to the total allocated resources to each user, and strives to allocate resources to users attaining the minimum virtual cost. With the new mechanism, called per-server virtual cost fairness (PS-VCF), users do not envy the cost-allotments of each other. We develop a distributed implementation for the proposed mechanism which is also adapted to apply resource-throttling on a per-server basis. We employ numerical experiments using real-world traces to show the effectiveness of PS-VCF in reducing servers’ operational costs.