Lattice[1] "cheats" by turning the bin packing problem into an auction. Execution agents perform a simple local calculation and send in their bids. Then jobs ar

Lattice[1] "cheats" by turning the bin packing problem into an auction. Execution agents perform a simple local calculation and send in their bids. Then jobs are placed according to those bids. This is because while you can try to produce an optimal distribution, it's a fool's errand in a distributed system. A perfect solver, given imperfect data, produces nonsense. GIGO, as they used to say. Amit Gupta wrote some notes last year about it[2]. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal. [1] http://lattice.cf/ http://lattice.cf/ [2] http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-cloud-foundry/products/app-placement-in-cloud-foundry-diego-a-classical-optimization-problem http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-cloud-foundry/products/app-pl...