719 research outputs found
Energy Efficient Scheduling via Partial Shutdown
Motivated by issues of saving energy in data centers we define a collection
of new problems referred to as "machine activation" problems. The central
framework we introduce considers a collection of machines (unrelated or
related) with each machine having an {\em activation cost} of . There
is also a collection of jobs that need to be performed, and is
the processing time of job on machine . We assume that there is an
activation cost budget of -- we would like to {\em select} a subset of
the machines to activate with total cost and {\em find} a schedule
for the jobs on the machines in minimizing the makespan (or any other
metric).
For the general unrelated machine activation problem, our main results are
that if there is a schedule with makespan and activation cost then we
can obtain a schedule with makespan \makespanconstant T and activation cost
\costconstant A, for any . We also consider assignment costs for
jobs as in the generalized assignment problem, and using our framework, provide
algorithms that minimize the machine activation and the assignment cost
simultaneously. In addition, we present a greedy algorithm which only works for
the basic version and yields a makespan of and an activation cost .
For the uniformly related parallel machine scheduling problem, we develop a
polynomial time approximation scheme that outputs a schedule with the property
that the activation cost of the subset of machines is at most and the
makespan is at most for any
Malleable Scheduling Beyond Identical Machines
In malleable job scheduling, jobs can be executed simultaneously on multiple machines with the processing time depending on the number of allocated machines. Jobs are required to be executed non-preemptively and in unison, in the sense that they occupy, during their execution, the same time interval over all the machines of the allocated set. In this work, we study generalizations of malleable job scheduling inspired by standard scheduling on unrelated machines. Specifically, we introduce a general model of malleable job scheduling, where each machine has a (possibly different) speed for each job, and the processing time of a job j on a set of allocated machines S depends on the total speed of S for j. For machines with unrelated speeds, we show that the optimal makespan cannot be approximated within a factor less than e/(e-1), unless P = NP. On the positive side, we present polynomial-time algorithms with approximation ratios 2e/(e-1) for machines with unrelated speeds, 3 for machines with uniform speeds, and 7/3 for restricted assignments on identical machines. Our algorithms are based on deterministic LP rounding and result in sparse schedules, in the sense that each machine shares at most one job with other machines. We also prove lower bounds on the integrality gap of 1+phi for unrelated speeds (phi is the golden ratio) and 2 for uniform speeds and restricted assignments. To indicate the generality of our approach, we show that it also yields constant factor approximation algorithms (i) for minimizing the sum of weighted completion times; and (ii) a variant where we determine the effective speed of a set of allocated machines based on the L_p norm of their speeds
Scheduling to Minimize Total Weighted Completion Time via Time-Indexed Linear Programming Relaxations
We study approximation algorithms for scheduling problems with the objective
of minimizing total weighted completion time, under identical and related
machine models with job precedence constraints. We give algorithms that improve
upon many previous 15 to 20-year-old state-of-art results. A major theme in
these results is the use of time-indexed linear programming relaxations. These
are natural relaxations for their respective problems, but surprisingly are not
studied in the literature.
We also consider the scheduling problem of minimizing total weighted
completion time on unrelated machines. The recent breakthrough result of
[Bansal-Srinivasan-Svensson, STOC 2016] gave a -approximation for the
problem, based on some lift-and-project SDP relaxation. Our main result is that
a -approximation can also be achieved using a natural and
considerably simpler time-indexed LP relaxation for the problem. We hope this
relaxation can provide new insights into the problem
A unified approach to truthful scheduling on related machines
We present a unified framework for designing deterministic monotone
polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS's) for a wide class of scheduling
problems on uniformly related machines. This class includes (among others)
minimizing the makespan, maximizing the minimum load, and minimizing the l_p
norm of the machine loads vector. Previously, this kind of result was only
known for the makespan objective. Monotone algorithms have the property that an
increase in the speed of a machine cannot decrease the amount of work assigned
to it. The key idea of our novel method is to show that for goal functions that
are sufficiently well-behaved functions of the machine loads, it is possible to
compute in polynomial time a highly structured nearly optimal schedule.
Monotone approximation schemes have an important role in the emerging area of
algorithmic mechanism design. In the game-theoretical setting of these
scheduling problems there is a social goal, which is one of the objective
functions that we study. Each machine is controlled by a selfish
single-parameter agent, where its private information is its cost of processing
a unit sized job, which is also the inverse of the speed of its machine. Each
agent wishes to maximize its own profit, defined as the payment it receives
from the mechanism minus its cost for processing all jobs assigned to it, and
places a bid which corresponds to its private information. For each one of the
problems, we show that we can calculate payments that guarantee truthfulness in
an efficient manner. Thus, there exists a dominant strategy where agents report
their true speeds, and we show the existence of a truthful mechanism which can
be implemented in polynomial time, where the social goal is approximated within
a factor of 1+epsilon for every epsilon>0
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