Competitive algorithms from competitive equilibria

Abstract

We introduce and study a general scheduling problem that we term the Packing Scheduling problem (PSP). In this problem, jobs can have different arrival times and sizes; a scheduler can process job j at rate xj, subject to arbitrary packing constraints over the set of rates (x) of the outstanding jobs. The PSP framework captures a variety of scheduling problems, including the classical problems of unrelated machines scheduling, broadcast scheduling, and scheduling jobs of different parallelizability. It also captures scheduling constraints arising in diverse modern environments ranging from individual computer architectures to data centers. More concretely, PSP models multidimensional resource requirements and parallelizability, as well as network bandwidth requirements found in data center scheduling.