A unified approach to scheduling on unrelated parallel machines

Abstract

We develop a single rounding algorithm for scheduling on unrelated parallel machines; this algorithm works well with the known linear programming-, quadratic programming-, and convex programming-relaxations for scheduling to minimize completion time, makespan, and other well-studied objective functions. This algorithm leads to the following applications for the general setting of unrelated parallel machines: (i) a bicriteria algorithm for a schedule whose weighted completion-time and makespan simultaneously exhibit the current-best individual approximations for these criteria; (ii) better-than-two approximation guarantees for scheduling to minimize the L p norm of the vector of machine-loads, for all 1 < p < ∞; and (iii) the first constant-factor multicriteria approximation algorithms that can handle the weighted completion-time and any given collection of integer L p norms. Our algorithm has a natural interpretation as a melding of linear-algebraic and probabilistic approaches. Via this view, it yields a common generalization of rounding theorems due to Karp et al. [1987] and Shmoys &amp; Tardos [1993], and leads to improved approximation algorithms for the problem of scheduling with resource-dependent processing times introduced by Grigoriev et al. [2007].

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2009
Source ID
10.1145/1552285.1552289

Entities

People

  • Aravind Srinivasan
  • Madhav Marathe
  • Srinivasan Parthasarathy
  • V. S. Anil Kumar

Organizations

  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • Defense Threat Reduction Agency
  • Division of Computer and Network Systems
  • Division of Social and Economic Sciences
  • International Business Machines Corporation (Armonk, NY)
  • National Institute of General Medical Sciences
  • National Science Foundation
  • University of Maryland
  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.
  • Operations Research