Preemptive Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks on Multiprocessor Systems

The use of multiprocessor systems consisting of identical and autonomous processors is a promising approach to the practical solution of problems arising in real-time applications and large compute-bound problems in general. However, finding techniques for obtaining efficient solutions to the related multiprocessor scheduling problems is a lit t le-understood problem. The authors s tudy the problem of scheduling a set of tasks whose operational precedence structure is representable as an acyclic directed graph. In scheduling tasks it is assumed that preemptions are allowed. The major results consist of the s ta tement and proof of an efficient algori thm for finding the minimal-length preemptive schedule for tree-structured computations.