Process Scheduling in Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems Using Task Duplication

Abstract

Scheduling tasks in heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing environments continues to be a challenging problem. In this paper, the authors investigate the Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) algorithm, along with alternative scheduling policies for task prioritising phases and the Critical Path on a Processor (CPOP) for scheduling tasks on a heterogeneous multiprocessor system. The authors show that by combining the HEFT algorithm selection policy with the task duplication strategy, it is possible to further reduce the schedule length produced by both HEFT and CPOP. The process scheduling algorithm presented in this paper compares favourably with other algorithms that use a similar strategy. The proposed algorithm has a time complexity of ?(¦V¦2(p + d)), whererepresents the number of tasks, p represents the number of processors and d the maximum in-degree of tasks.