Efficient Approximation Algorithms for Scheduling Malleable Tasks

A malleable task is a computational unit which may be executed on any arbitrary number of processors, its execution time depend- ing on the amount of resources allotted to it. According to the standard behavior of parallel applications, we assume that the mal- leable tasks are monotonic, i.e. that the execution time is decreas- ing with the number of processors while the computational work increases. This paper presents a new approach for scheduling a set of independent malleable tasks which leads to a worst case guar- antee of for the minimization of the parallel execution time, or makespan. It improves all other existing practical results includ- ing the two-phases method introduced by Turek et al. The main idea is to transfer the difficulty of a two phases method from the scheduling part to the allotment selection. We show how to formu- late this last problem as a knapsack optimization problem. Then, the scheduling problem is solved by a dual-approximation which leads to a simple structure of two consecutive shelves