Minimizing Weighted lp-Norm of Flow-Time in the Rejection Model

We consider the online scheduling problem to minimize the weighted ell_p-norm of flow-time of jobs. We study this problem under the rejection model introduced by Choudhury et al. (SODA 2015) - here the online algorithm is allowed to not serve an eps-fraction of the requests. We consider the restricted assignments setting where each job can go to a specified subset of machines. Our main result is an immediate dispatch non-migratory 1/eps^{O(1)}-competitive algorithm for this problem when one is allowed to reject at most eps-fraction of the total weight of jobs arriving. This is in contrast with the speed augmentation model under which no online algorithm for this problem can achieve a competitive ratio independent of p

From Preemptive to Non-preemptive Scheduling Using Rejections

International audienceWe study the classical problem of scheduling a set of independent jobs with release dates on a single machine. There exists a huge literature on the preemptive version of the problem, where the jobs can be interrupted at any moment. However, we focus here on the non-preemptive case, which is harder, but more relevant in practice. For instance, the jobs submitted to actual high performance platforms cannot be interrupted or migrated once they start their execution (due to prohibitive management overhead). We target on the minimization of the total stretch objective, defined as the ratio of the total time a job stays in the system (waiting time plus execution time), normalized by its processing time. Stretch captures the quality of service of a job and the minimum total stretch reflects the fairness between the jobs. So far, there have been only few studies about this problem, especially for the non-preemptive case. Our approach is based to the usage of the classical and efficient for the preemptive case shortest remaining processing time (SRPT) policy as a lower bound. We investigate the (offline) transformation of the SRPT schedule to a non-preemptive schedule subject to a recently introduced resource augmentation model, namely the rejection model according to which we are allowed to reject a small fraction of jobs. Specifically, we propose a 2 ǫ-approximation algorithm for the total stretch minimization problem if we allow to reject an ǫ-fraction of the jobs, for any ǫ > 0. This result shows that the rejection model is more powerful than the other resource augmentations models studied in the literature, like speed augmentation or machine augmentation, for which non-polynomial or non-scalable results are known. As a byproduct, we present a O(1)-approximation algorithm for the total flow-time minimization problem which also rejects at most an \epsilon-fraction of jobs

Online Min-Sum Flow Scheduling with Rejections

International audienceIn this paper, we study the problems of preemptive and non-preemptive online scheduling of jobs on unrelated machines in order to minimize the average time a job remains in the system.Both problems are known to be non-approximable by a constant factor. However, the preemptive variant has been extensively studied under the different resource augmentation models. On the other hand, the non-preemptive variant is much less explored. An O( 1/epsilon )-competitive algorithm has been presented in [7] for the non-preemptive average flow-time minimization problem on a set of unrelated machines if bothan epsilon-speed augmentation is used and an epsilon-fraction of jobs is rejected. We are interested here in exploring the power of the rejection model and, mainly, in eliminating the need for speed augmentation in the latter result. On the road to this, we show how to replace speed augmentation with rejection in the preemptive variant. Our analysis is based on the dual-fitting paradigm