scheduling against an adversarial network
Using idle times of the processors is a well-known approach to run coarse grained parallel algorithms for extremely complex problems. We present on-line algorithms for scheduling the processes of a parallel application that is known off-line on a dynamic network in which the idle times of the processors are dictated by an adversary. We also take communication and synchronization costs into account.Our first contribution consists of a formal model to restrict the adversary in a reasonable way. We then show a constant factor approximation for the off-line scheduling problem. As this problem has to take communication cost into account, it can be seen as a generalization of many NP-hard parallel machine scheduling problems. Finally, we present on-line algorithms for different models with constant or with "nearly constant" competitive ratio.
parallel machine scheduling parallel computation competitive algorithms