Communication-aware scheduling of precedence-constrained tasks on related machines

Abstract

Scheduling precedence-constrained tasks is a classical problem that has been studied for more than fifty years. However, little progress has been made in the setting where there are non-uniform communication delays between tasks. In this work, we propose a new scheduler, Generalized Earliest Time First (GETF), and provide the first provable, worst-case approximation guarantees for the goals of minimizing both the makespan and total weighted completion time of tasks with precedence constraints on related machines with machine-dependent communication speeds.