Robust task scheduling in non-deterministic heterogeneous computing systems

The paper addresses the problem of matching and scheduling of DAG-structured application to both minimize the makespan and maximize the robustness in a heterogeneous computing system. Due to the conflict of the two objectives, it is usually impossible to achieve both goals at the same time. We give two definitions of robustness of a schedule based on tardiness and miss rate. Slack is proved to be an effective metric to be used to adjust the robustness. We employ ε-constraint method to solve the bi-objective optimization problem where minimizing the makespan and maximizing the slack are the two objectives. Overall performance of a schedule considering both makespan and robustness is defined such that user have the flexibility to put emphasis on either objective. Experiment results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. © 2006 IEEE.