Topic 3: Scheduling and load balancing (Introduction)

Abstract

Despite significant effort parallel and distributed systems available today are still not fully utilized and exploited. Scheduling and load balancing techniques remain crucial for implementing efficient parallel and distributed applications and for making best use of existing parallel and distributed systems. The need for such techniques intensifies with the foreseen advent of exa-scale computer systems with many core and accelerator architectures. Similarly, cloud computing became a viable paradigm for some applications. Scheduling includes planning and optimization of the resource allocation as well as coping with the dynamics of the systems. These topics have been subject for research for many decades but remain one of the core topics in parallel and distributed computing. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.