Value-maximizing deadline scheduling and its application to animation rendering

We describe a new class of utility-maximization scheduling problem with precedence constraints, the disconnected staged scheduling problem (DSSP). DSSP is a nonpreemptive multiprocessor deadline scheduling problem that arises in several commercially-important applications, including animation rendering, protein analysis, and seismic signal processing. DSSP differs from most previously-studied deadline scheduling problems because the graph of precedence constraints among tasks within jobs is disconnected, with one component per job. Another difference is that in practice we often lack accurate estimates of task execution times, and so purely offline solutions are not possible. However we do know the set of jobs and their precedence constraints up front and therefore some offline planning is possible. Our solution decomposes DSSP into an offline job selection phase followed by an online task dispatching phase. We model the former as a knapsack problem and explore several solutions to ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Eric Anderson, Dirk Beyer 0002, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Terence Kelly, Norman Salazar, Cipriano A. Santos, Ram Swaminathan, Robert Endre Tarjan, Janet L. Wiener, Yunhong Zhou
• Keywords: Deadline Scheduling Problems, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Precedence Constraints, Scheduling Problems, SPAA 2005