Evaluating the optimal server allocation policy for clusters with on/off sources

We investigate a system with reconfigurable servers and bursty arrival streams for different job types. The problem of when to reallocate servers from one job type to another will then be formulated as a Markov decision process. We will show that solving this Markov decision process is very problematic for any but the most simple systems, demonstrating the need for heuristics. The performance of several heuristic allocations will be compared to that of the optimal policy for some cases and shown to yield reasonable performance.