Power of preemption on uniform parallel machines

Abstract

For a scheduling problem on parallel machines, the power of preemption is defined as the ratio of the makespan of an optimal non-preemptive schedule over the makespan of an optimal preemptive schedule. For m uniform parallel machines, we give the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the global bound of 2-1/m is tight. If the makespan of the optimal preemptive schedule is defined by the ratio of the total processing times of r < m longest jobs over the total speed of r fastest machines, we show that the tight bound on the power of preemption is 2-1/min{r,m-r}