Program Partitioning and Scheduling in Parallel and Distributed Systems: Introduction

Our motivation for the publication of this tutorial comes from the profound importance and impact of scheduling and load balancing methods on parallel and distributed systems. Concurrent processing in general, and scheduling and load balancing in particular, have been the subjects of research and development during the past two decades. Since the late 1980s, newly available commercial concurrent systems have heightened interest in the areas of scheduling and load balancing. For example, the number of papers published in this area, both in journals and conference proceedings, has increased continually over the past few years. En addition, several workshops and special issues of journals have recently been dedicated to the topic of scheduling and load balancing in parallel systems. Some examples include: