Tags:Asymptotic performance, Cost distributions, Empirical evaluation and Longest Processing Time (LPT) heuristic
Abstract:
When independent tasks are to be scheduled onto identical processors, the typical goal is to minimize the makespan. A simple and efficient heuristic consists in scheduling first the task with the longest processing time (LPT heuristic), and to plan its execution as soon as possible. While the performance of LPT has already been largely studied, in particular its asymptotic performance, we revisit results and propose a novel analysis for the case of tasks generated through uniform integer compositions. Also, we perform extensive simulations to empirically assess the asymptotic performance of LPT. Results demonstrate that the absolute error rapidly tends to zero for several distributions of task costs, including ones studied by theoretical models, and realistic distributions coming from benchmarks.