Task scheduling algorithm to give a reasonable number of processors taking account of communication overhead

It is noted that conventional list scheduling algorithms based on the critical path method keep the processor utilization low in the cases where communication overhead is considered. A novel heuristic algorithm which contributes to saving the investment of processor resources and improving the processor utilization is proposed. The scheduling result shows that the algorithm works well. The algorithm gives almost the same schedule length with half the number of processors compared with a conventional scheduling algorithm. This means that the throughput of the system can be raised by executing other applications on the remaining processors.