Process scheduling in heterogeneous multiprocessor systems

In heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing environments, task scheduling continues to be one of the most challenging problems. This paper investigates the Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) algorithm, along with its alternative scheduling policies for the task prioritising phases, and the Critical Path on a Processor (CPOP) for scheduling tasks on a heterogeneous multiprocessor system. It is shown 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 has a time complexity of O(|V|2(p + d)), where |V| represents the number of tasks, p represents the number of processors and d the maximum in-degree of tasks.