A unified approach to scheduling on unrelated parallel machines

TitleA unified approach to scheduling on unrelated parallel machines
Publication TypeJournal Articles
Year of Publication2009
AuthorsKumar AVS, Marathe MV, Parthasarathy S, Srinivasan A
JournalJ. ACM
Volume56
Issue5
Pagination28:1–28:31 - 28:1–28:31
Date Published2009/08//
ISBN Number0004-5411
KeywordsApproximation algorithms, Randomized rounding, scheduling under multiple criteria
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 Lp 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 Lp 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 & Tardos [1993], and leads to improved approximation algorithms for the problem of scheduling with resource-dependent processing times introduced by Grigoriev et al. [2007].

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1552285.1552289
DOI10.1145/1552285.1552289