Scheduling task systems with resources

Minimum execution time scheduling of task systems with resources has been the subject of several papers over the past few years. The model used for much of this work assumes that the resources in the system are continuous. That is, there is one unit of each resource, and a task may require any portion of that unit during its execution. While this is a reasonable assumption for certain bin packing applications, it is intuitively unreasonable for certain other applications. In particular, the resources associated with computer systems readers, printers, disk drives are not "continuous" resources. We present an alternative model of task systems with resources in which the resources are discrete. That is, there are a specific number of indivisible units of each resource and a task may require only integral numbers of those units. Several results involving the worst case performance of list scheduling and critical path scheduling with respect to this model are given. A new result on critical path scheduling of task systems with continuous resources is also given. Finally, a comparison will be made between corresponding bounds for the continuous and discrete models. Thesis Supervisor: Ronald 1.. Rivest Title: Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering