Grid Meter » with Grid, it's all in the timing ...

November 23, 2005 | Comments: (0)

with Grid, it's all in the timing ...

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Tomorrow, many of us embark on one of the most complex problems known to queuing theory: getting Thanksgiving dinner timed. It's a complex problem of resource management, job priority, and timing. There are distributions for service times and inter-arrival times, deterministic and non-deterministic jobs, and FCFS, LCFS, and SIRO queues. And if you can't align your mashed potatoes and stuffing with your dining goals, you're in big trouble.

I often say that queuing theory is more important than the alphabet and we should be teaching it in preschool. I usually say this while I'm standing in line or sitting in a traffic jam and feel that if store managers and traffic engineers had even an elementary understanding of queuing theory, lines and traffic jams would be a thing of the past. I certainly recall from grad school that some of the math that goes into describing complex ordered systems can get a bit hairy, but there are simple ways to get preschoolers to understand the need to control process ordering with a funnel and a bucket of marbles.

Similar to the complexities of the Thanksgiving dinner, Grid computing, with shared resources that often present non-deterministic availability times, adds levels of complexity far beyond that of simple linear systems. I haven't seen a great deal of mathematical descriptions of Grid type systems, but perhaps that is because these systems are quite unique and lack common denominators, and admittedly I haven't been looking all that hard. Regardless, these are going to be some pretty complex systems to understand and for some of us who's recall of Little's Laws seems just a distant memory, may have to work harder than others to understand them.

So while I'm attempting to get Thanksgiving dinner to all come together at the right time tomorrow, and yes, I'm doing the cooking. I'll be thinking of a way to teach queuing theory to preschoolers in a clever jingle to the tune of "twinkle twinkle little star".

Does anyone know a word that rhymes with Markovian?

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 23, 2005 08:49 AM

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