Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Simon Julian Powers

Junaid Ahmed

Jia Zhu

Yi Zou

Paolo Codato

A technique is described herein for allocating tasks within a distributed system. The distributed system includes plural computing devices. Each computing device, in turn, provides a bucket manager and at least one application instance. The bucket managers allocate work to the computing devices in units of buckets, in a manner governed by a set of application-specific initialization parameters. The bucket managers also perform their assignment function in cooperation with a separate storage and notification (S&N) system. The S&N system stores data nodes in a hierarchical data structure that reflect the assignment-related state of the distributed system. The S&N system also notifies the bucket managers upon changes in the data nodes. According to one provision, the bucket managers include logic that reduces expensive context changes when computing devices join and leave the distributed system.

Distributed system that promotes task-machine affinity

A persistent peer-to-peer network is implemented over a network with master-slave topology. Data being sent from master to slave or from slave to master are sent in one transmission, but data sent from one slave to another is received by the master and retransmitted to the slave. A session table is kept at each device includes an ordered list of devices, where the first device is the master device. When a master device drops out of the network the slave devices promote the next device in the ordered list of devices to master. A master device may also receive a request from a slave device to become master, and update its session table and send the updated session table to all devices. The slave device requesting master status is then treated as master by all devices in the network.

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Simon Julian Powers