Scheduling in the Dark

We considered non-clairvoyant multiprocessor scheduling of jobs with arbitrary arrival times and changing execution characteristics. The problem has been studied extensively when either the jobs all arrive at time zero, or when all the jobs are fully parallelizable, or when the scheduler has considerable knowledge about the jobs. This paper considers for the first time this problem without any of these three restrictions yet when our algorithm is given more resources than the adversary. We provide new upper and lower bound techniques applicable in this more difficult scenario. The results are of both theoretical and practical interest. In our model, a job can arrive at any arbitrary time and its execution characteristics can change through the life of the job from being anywhere from fully parallelizable to completely sequential. We assume that the scheduler has no knowledge about the jobs except for knowing when a job arrives and knowing when it completes. (This is why we say that t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: STOC
• Authors: Jeff Edmonds
• Keywords: Algorithms, Arbitrary Arrival Times, Execution Characteristics, Non-clairvoyant Multiprocessor Scheduling, STOC 1999