Non-clairvoyant Scheduling of Multiple Bag-of-Tasks Applications

The bag-of-tasks application model, albeit simple, arises in many application domains and has received a lot of attention in the scheduling literature. Previous works propose either theoretically sound solutions that rely on unrealistic assumptions, or ad-hoc heuristics with no guarantees on performance. This work attempts to bridge this gap through the design of non-clairvoyant heuristics based on solid theoretical foundations. The performance achieved by these heuristics is studied via simulations in a view to comparing them both to previously proposed solutions and to theoretical upper bounds on achievable performance. Also, an interesting theoretical result in this work is that a straightforward on-demand heuristic delivers asymptotically optimal performance when the communications or the computations can be neglected.