  Load balancing algorithms play a vital role in enhancing performance in data
centers and cloud networks. Due to the massive size of these systems,
scalability challenges, and especially the communication overhead associated
with load balancing mechanisms, have emerged as major concerns. Motivated by
these issues, we introduce and analyze a novel class of load balancing schemes
where the various servers provide occasional queue updates to guide the load
assignment.
  We show that the proposed schemes strongly outperform JSQ($d$) strategies
with comparable communication overhead per job, and can achieve a vanishing
waiting time in the many-server limit with just one message per job, just like
the popular JIQ scheme. The proposed schemes are particularly geared however
towards the sparse feedback regime with less than one message per job, where
they outperform corresponding sparsified JIQ versions.
  We investigate fluid limits for synchronous updates as well as asynchronous
exponential update intervals. The fixed point of the fluid limit is identified
in the latter case, and used to derive the queue length distribution. We also
demonstrate that in the ultra-low feedback regime the mean stationary waiting
time tends to a constant in the synchronous case, but grows without bound in
the asynchronous case.
