Patent ID: 6948009

Claim:
A method for increasing processor utilization, comprising: initially assigning operations to a plurality of processes for processing; adding a process to an available process queue in response to a completion of processing by the process; determining whether one or more processes are available in the available process queue if there are operations that have not been processed; and if one or more processes are determined to be available, then allocating selected operations between the process and at least one of the available processes, wherein the selected operations have been assigned to the process for processing but have not been processed by the process, and wherein initially assigning the operations further comprises: (i) maintaining a list of the operations, wherein the operations in the list have an unknown execution time; and (ii) assigning the operations in the list among the plurality of processes, wherein the processes are assigned at least one operation in the list, and wherein a first process and a second process are assigned an equal number of operations from the list.