A fundamental problem to all data-parallel applications is data locality. An example is map task scheduling in the MapReduce framework. Existing theoretical work analyzes systems with only two levels of locality, despite the existence of multiple locality levels within and across data centers. We found that going from two to three levels of locality changes the problem drastically, as a tradeoff between performance and throughput emerges. The recently proposed priority algorithm, which is throughput and heavy-traffic optimal for two locality levels, is not even throughput-optimal with three locality levels. The JSQ-MaxWeight algorithm proposed by Wang et al. is heavy-traffic optimal only for a special traffic scenario with two locality levels. We show that an extension of the JSQ-MaxWeight algorithm to three locality levels preserves its throughput-optimality, but suffers from the same lack of heavy-traffic optimality for most traffic scenarios. We propose a novel algorithm that uses Weighted-Workload (WW) routing and priority service. We establish its throughput and heavy-traffic optimality for all traffic scenarios. The main challenge is the construction of an appropriate ideal load decomposition that allows the separate treatment of different subsystems.

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