Scheduling Jobs Using Common Resources

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of distributed resource allocation in different models of computation and communication in distributed systems, and presents a number of time optimal (randomized and deterministic) allocation algorithms. We consider the dining/drinking philosophers problem as presented in [B. Awerbuch and M. Saks, in "FOCS," pp. 65-74. IEEE, New York, 1990]. In the algorithm presented in that paper, the delay from the creation of a job to the time it started executing depends quadratically on the number of jobs conflicting with it. In this paper we improve this result by presenting an algorithm for which the dependence becomes linear, which is optimal. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.