Scheduling for Parallel Processing

Overview and Goals This book is dedicated to scheduling for parallel processing. Presenting a research field as broad as this one poses considerable difficulties. Scheduling for parallel computing is an interdisciplinary subject joining many fields of science and te- nology. Thus, to understand the scheduling problems and the methods of solving them it is necessary to know the limitations in related areas. Another difficulty is that the subject of scheduling parallel computations is immense. Even simple search in bibliographical databases reveals thousands of publications on this topic. The - versity in understanding scheduling problems is so great that it seems impossible to juxtapose them in one scheduling taxonomy. Therefore, most of the papers on scheduling for parallel processing refer to one scheduling problem resulting from one way of perceiving the reality. Only a few publications attempt to arrange this field of knowledge systematically. In this book we will follow two guidelines. One guideline is a distinction - tween scheduling models which comprise a set of scheduling problems solved by dedicated algorithms. Thus, the aim of this book is to present scheduling models for parallel processing, problems defined on the grounds of certain scheduling models, and algorithms solving the scheduling problems. Most of the scheduling problems are combinatorial in nature. Therefore, the second guideline is the methodology of computational complexity theory. In this book we present four examples of scheduling models. Wewillgodeepinto the models, problems, and algorithms so that after acquiring some understanding of them we will attempt to draw conclusions on their mutual relationships.