We consider the following scheduling problem. There are m parallel machines and n independent.jobs. Each job is to be assigned to one of the machines. The processing of.job j on machine i requires time Pip The objective is to lind a schedule that minimizes the makespan. Our main result is a polynomial algorithm which constructs a schedule that is guaranteed to be no longer than twice the optimum. We also present a polynomial approximation scheme for the case that the number of machines is fixed. Both approximation results are corollaries of a theorem about the relationship of a class of integer programming problems and their linear programming relaxations. In particular, we give a polynomial method to round the fractional extreme points of the linear program to integral points that nearly satisfy the constraints. In contrast to our main result, we prove that no polynomial algorithm can achieve a worst-case ratio less than ~ unless P = NP. We finally obtain a complexity classification for all special cases with a fixed number of processing times.

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Abstract We study the following general online scheduling problem. Parallel jobs arrive dynamically according to the dependencies between them. Each job requests a certain number of processors with a specific communication configuration, but its running time is not known until it is completed. We present optimal online algorithms for PRAMs, hy\Lambda

Scheduling has been studied extensively in many varieties and from many viewpoints. Inspired by applications in practical computer systems, it developed into a theoretical area with many interesting results, both positive and negative. The basic situation we study is the following. We have some sequence of jobs that have to be processed on the machines available to us. In the most basic problem, each job is characterized by its running time and has to be scheduled for that time on one of the machines. In other variants there may be additional restrictions or relaxations specifying which schedules are allowed. We want to schedule the jobs as efficiently as possible, which most often means that the total length of the schedule (the makespan) should be as small as possible, but other objective functions are also considered. The notion of an on-line algorithm is intended to formalize the realistic scenario, where the algorithm does not have the access to the whole inp...

Parallel programs may be represented as a set of interrelated sequential tasks. When multiprocessors are used to execute such programs, the parallel portion of the application can be speeded up by an appropriate allocation of processors to the tasks of the application. Given a parallel application defined by a task precedence graph, the goal of task scheduling (or processor assignment) is thus the minimization of the makespan of the application. In a heterogeneous multiprocessor system, task scheduling consists in determining which tasks will be assigned to each processor, as well as the execution order of the tasks assigned to each processor. In this work, we apply the tabu search metaheuristic to the solution of the task scheduling problem on a heterogeneous multiprocessor environment under precedence constraints. The topology of the Mean Value Analysis solution package for product form queueing networks is used as the framework for performance evaluation. We show that tabu search ob...

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Scheduling has been studied extensively in many varieties and from many viewpoints. Inspired by applications in practical computer systems, it developed into a theoretical area with many interesting results, both positive and negative. The basic situation we study is the following. We have some sequence of jobs

This chapter presents an introduction to the competitive analysis of online algorithms. In an online problem...

We investigate the influence of different algorithmic choices on the approximation ratio in selfish scheduling. Our goal is to design local policies that minimize the inefficiency of resulting equilibria. In particular, we design optimal coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling, and improve the known approximation ratio from Θ(m) to Θ(log m), where m is the number of machines. A local policy for each machine orders the set of jobs assigned to it only based on parameters of those jobs. A strongly local policy only uses the processing time of jobs on the the same machine. We prove that the approximation ratio of any set of strongly local ordering policies in equilibria is at least Ω(m). In particular, it implies that the approximation ratio of a greedy shortest-first algorithm for machine scheduling is at least Ω(m). This closes the gap between the known lower and upper bounds for this problem, and answers an open question raised by Ibarra and Kim [16], and Davis and Jaffe [10]. We then design a local ordering policy with the approximation ratio of Θ(log m) in equilibria, and prove that this policy is optimal among all local ordering policies. This policy orders the jobs in the non-decreasing order of their inefficiency, i.e, the ratio between the processing time on that machine over the minimum processing time. Finally, we show that best responses of players for the inefficiency-based policy may not converge to a pure Nash equilibrium, and present a Θ(log² m) policy for which we can prove fast convergence of best responses to pure Nash equilibria.

On-line machine scheduling has been studied extensively, but the fundamental issue of fairness in scheduling is still mostly open. In this paper we explore the issue in settings where there are long lived processes which should be repeatedly scheduled for various tasks throughout the lifetime of a system. For any such instance we develop a notion of desired load of a process, which is a function of the tasks it participates in. The unfairness of a system is the maximum, taken over all processes, of the difference between the desired load and the actual load. An example of such a setting is the carpool problem suggested by Fagin and Williams [16]. In this problem, a set of n people form a carpool. On each day a subset of the people arrive and one of them is designated as the driver. A scheduling rule is required so that the driver will be determined in a `fair' way. We investigate this problem under various assumptions on the input distribution. We also show that the carpool problems can capture several other problems of fairness in scheduling.