Scheduling with communication delays and on-line disturbances

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of scheduling tasks on multiprocessors. Two tasks linked by a precedence constraint and executed by two different processors must communicate. The resulting delay depends on the tasks and on the processor network. In our model an estimation of the delay is known at compile time; but disturbances due to network contention, link failures⋯ may occur at execution time. Algorithms computing separately the processor assignment and the sequencing on each processor are considered. We propose a partially on-line scheduling algorithm based on critical paths to cope with the possible disturbances. Some theoretical results and an experimental study show the interest of this approach compared with fully on-line scheduling. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999.