[rfonseca]

Really great research work from Kay Ousterhout. Sparrow extends the "power of two choices" [1] to a more general formulation, and makes it really cheap to find very good choices (i.e., low-load servers) to run a task, without having to check the load on every server. As the number of tasks and number of servers grow, keeping an accurate picture of the load on every server makes the scheduler become a bottleneck. Kay's work showed a very interesting point in this design space for fast and high-quality scheduling.

Her PhD work went on to really understand the performance of complex distributed programs, like large Spark jobs, and a lot of at least earlier performance instrumentation in Spark is due to her.[2]

[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2012/01/17/two-random.html [2] http://kayousterhout.org/