A multiprocessor scheduling heuristic for functional parallelism and its performance measure

This paper addresses the following scheduling problem: given a precedence graph with communication costs and a machine architecture with different types of processors, construct a schedule that runs on the given architecture at the minimum possible execution time. The main contributions are: Firstly, we present a static scheduling algorithm that keeps processors idle for future important tasks and fills idle time slots incurred due to interprocessor communication. Secondly, to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, we develop a lower bound on the length of a optimal schedule as a yardstick. Experiments show that this new approach produces better schedules and takes much less compile time.