On-line restricted assignment of temporary tasks with unknown durations
We consider load balancing of temporary tasks on m machines in the restricted assignment model. It is known that the best competitive ratio for this problem is Theta(rootm). This bound is not achieved by the greedy algorithm whose competitive ratio is known to be Omega(m(2/3)). We give an alternative analysis to the greedy algorithm which is better than the known analysis for relatively small values of m. We also show that for a small number of machines, namely m less than or equal to 5, the greedy algorithm is optimal. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
temporary tasks competitiveness on-line algorithms