SCHEDULING PREEMPTIVE MULTIPROCESSOR TASKS ON DEDICATED PROCESSORS

In the classical scheduling theory it is widely assumed that any task requires for its processing only one processor at a time. In this paper the problem of deterministic scheduling of tasks requiring for their processing more than one processor at a time, i.e., a constant set of dedicated processors, is analyzed. Schedule length is assumed to be a performance measure. Tasks are assumed to be preemptable and independent. Low order polynomial algorithms for simple cases of the problem are given. Then a method to solve the general version of the problem for a limited number of processors is presented, while the case of an arbitrary number of processors is known to be NP-hard. Finally, a version of the problem, where besides processors every task can also require additional resources, is considered.