An Experimental Study of Data Migration Algorithms

The data migration problem is the problem of computing a plan for moving data objects stored on devices in a network from one configuration to another. Load balancing or changing usage patterns might necessitate such a rearrangement of data. In this paper, we consider the case where the objects are fixed-size and the network is complete. We introduce two new data migration algorithms, one of which has provably good bounds. We empirically compare the performance of these new algorithms against similar algorithms from Hall et al. [7] which have better theoretical guarantees and find that in almost all cases, the new algorithms perform better. We also find that both the new algorithms and the ones from Hall et al. perform much better in practice than the theoretical bounds suggest.