Patent ID: 7302450

Claim:
A method of scheduling submission of work units for execution on a data processing system, the method including the steps of: providing a plurality of attributes for each work unit, each attribute being indicative of the usage of a corresponding resource of the system by the work unit, wherein the plurality of attributes for each work unit includes at least one of a first attribute indicative of a usage of a processing power, a second attribute indicative of a usage of a memory of the system, or a third attribute indicative of a usage of an input/output activity of the system; selecting a subset of the work units for optimizing the usage of each resource individually according to a corresponding combination of the attributes; and submitting the selected work units, wherein the step of selecting the subset of the work units includes: defining an objective function indicative of a distribution of the usage of the resources of the system, wherein the step of defining the objective function includes, for each combination of the eligible work units: calculating a total parameter for each resource by summing the attributes corresponding to the resource for each eligible work unit of the combination, and calculating a discontinuance factor by summing the absolute value of the differences between each pair of total parameters.