SPEAKER: Adam Wierman TIME: Wednesday 12-1pm, March 28, 2007 PLACE: NSH 1507 TITLE: Fairness in queues ABSTRACT: The growing trend in computer systems towards using scheduling policies that prioritize jobs with small service requirements has resulted in a new focus on the fairness of such policies. In particular, researchers have been interested in whether biasing towards small job sizes results in large jobs being treated "unfairly." However, unfairness is an amorphous concept and thus difficult to define and study. In this talk, I will present some recent attempts to define and study the concept of fairness in single server queueing settings. Rather than providing the unique, correct definition of fairness for queues, my goal in this talk is to illustrate, compare, and contrast, the range of fairness measures that have been suggested and to summarize what interesting open questions remain for each.