Anomalies in scheduling unit-time tasks.
Marc T. Kaufman · 1972
In this paper we examine the problem of scheduling a set of tasks on a system with a number of identical processors. Several timing anomalies are known to exist for the general case, in which the execution time can increase when inter-task constraints are removed or processors are added. It is shown that these anomalies also exist when tasks are restricted to be of equal (unit) length. Several, increasingly restrictive, heuristic scheduling algorithms are reviewed. The added processor anomaly is shown to persist through all of them, though in successively weaker form.