We revisit the classical non-clairvoyant problem of scheduling a set of n jobs on a set of m parallel identical machines where the processing time of a job is not known until the job finishes. Our objective is the minimization of the makespan, i.e., the date at which the last job terminates its execution. We adopt the framework of learning-augmented algorithms and we study the question of whether (possibly erroneous) predictions may help design algorithms with a competitive ratio which is good when the prediction is accurate (consistency), deteriorates gradually with respect to the prediction error (smoothness), and not too bad and bounded when the prediction is arbitrarily bad (robustness). We first consider the non-preemptive case and we devise lower bounds, as a function of the error of the prediction, for any deterministic learning-augmented algorithm. Then we analyze a variant of Longest Processing Time first (LPT) algorithm (with and without release dates) and we prove that it is consistent, smooth, and robust. Furthermore, we study the preemptive case and we provide lower bounds for any deterministic algorithm with predictions as a function of the prediction error. Finally, we introduce a variant of the classical Round Robin algorithm (RR), the Predicted Proportional Round Robin algorithm (PPRR), which we prove to be consistent, smooth and robust.

Using machine-learned predictions to create algorithms with better approximation guarantees is a very fresh and active field. In this work, we study classic scheduling problems under the learning augmented setting. More specifically, we consider the problem of scheduling jobs with arbitrary release dates on a single machine and the problem of scheduling jobs with a common release date on multiple machines. Our objective is to minimize the sum of completion times. For both problems, we propose algorithms which use predictions for taking their decisions. Our algorithms are consistent -- i.e. when the predictions are accurate, the performances of our algorithms are close to those of an optimal offline algorithm--, and robust -- i.e. when the predictions are wrong, the performance of our algorithms are close to those of an online algorithm without predictions. In addition, we confirm the above theoretical bounds by conducting experimental evaluation comparing the proposed algorithms to the offline optimal ones for both the single and multiple machines settings.

In this paper, we introduce a model for the speed scaling setting in the framework of explorable uncertainty. In the model, each job has a release time, a deadline and an unknown workload that can be revealed to the algorithm only after executing a query that induces a given additional job-dependent load. Alternatively, the job may be executed without any query, but in that case its workload is equal to a given upper bound. This assumption is motivated for instance in applications like code optimization, or file compression. We study the problem of minimizing the overall energy consumption for executing all the jobs in their time windows. We also consider the related problem of minimizing the maximum speed used by the algorithm. We present lower and upper bounds for both the offline case, where all the jobs are known in advance, and the online case, where the jobs arrive over time. We start with the single machine setting and we finally deal with the more general case where multiple identical parallel machines are available.

Bleuse et al. (EuroPar 2018) introduced a general model for interference-aware scheduling in large scale parallel platforms. They considered two different types of communications: the flows induced by data exchanges during computations and the flows related to Input/Output operations. Rather than taking into account these communications explicitly, they restrict the possible allocations of a job by external topological constraints. In their work, jobs are considered to be rigid: a job requires a specific number of machines in order to be executed. Here, we first adopt the same framework for the platform and the aforementioned topological constraints. We show that there is no polynomial time approximation algorithm under the rigid setting with ratio smaller than 3/2, unless P = NP. Then, we focus on the malleable setting. We show that in the proportional-malleable setting, where the work of every job remains constant independently of the number of machines on which it is executed, the scheduling problem remains NPhard even in the uniform case, where the maximum number of machines is the same for all the jobs. Then, we propose a 2-approximation algorithm for this case. Furthermore, we present an approximation algorithm solving the more general case where the maximum number of machines is job-dependent and the work of the jobs is increasing with respect to the number of used machines, due to the communication overhead.

Abstract Deep reinforcement learning is gaining popularity in many different fields. An interesting sector is related to the definition of dynamic decision-making systems. A possible example is dynamic portfolio optimization, where an agent has to continuously reallocate an amount of fund into a number of different financial assets with the final goal of maximizing return and minimizing risk. In this work, a novel deep Q-learning portfolio management framework is proposed. The framework is composed by two elements: a set of local agents that learn assets behaviours and a global agent that describes the global reward function. The framework is tested on a crypto portfolio composed by four cryptocurrencies. Based on our results, the deep reinforcement portfolio management framework has proven to be a promising approach for dynamic portfolio optimization.

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs to minimize the maximum weighted flow-time on a set of related machines. When jobs can be preempted this problem is well-understood; for example, there exists a constant competitive algorithm using speed augmentation. When jobs must be scheduled non-preemptively, only hardness results are known. In this paper, we present the first online guarantees for the non-preemptive variant. We present the first constant competitive algorithm for minimizing the maximum weighted flow-time on related machines by relaxing the problem and assuming that the online algorithm can reject a small fraction of the total weight of jobs. This is essentially the best result possible given the strong lower bounds on the non-preemptive problem without rejection.

Summary We study the problem of executing an application represented by a precedence task graph on a parallel machine composed of standard computing cores and accelerators. Both off‐line and on‐line settings are addressed by proposing generic scheduling approaches. In the first case, we establish strong lower bounds on the worst‐case performance of a known approach based on Linear Programming and replace the greedy List Scheduling policy used in this approach by a better task ordering. Although this modification leads to the same approximability guarantees, it performs much better in practice. We also extend this algorithm to more types of computing units, achieving an approximation ratio which depends on the number of different types. In the on‐line case, tasks arrive in any order which respects the precedence relations and the scheduler has to take irrevocable decisions about their allocation and execution. We propose the first on‐line scheduling algorithm taking into account precedences, which is based on adequate rules for selecting the type of processor where to allocate the tasks. Finally, all the previous algorithms have been experimented on a large number of simulations built on actual libraries, assessing their good practical behavior with respect to the state‐of‐the‐art solutions and baseline algorithms.

In this paper, we consider the online problem of scheduling independent jobs non-preemptively so as to minimize the weighted flow-time on a set of unrelated machines. There has been a considerable amount of work on this problem in the preemptive setting where several competitive algorithms are known in the classical competitive model. However, the problem in the non-preemptive setting admits a strong lower bound. Recently, Lucarelli et al. presented an algorithm that achieves a O(1/epsilon^2)-competitive ratio when the algorithm is allowed to reject epsilon-fraction of total weight of jobs and has an epsilon-speed augmentation. They further showed that speed augmentation alone is insufficient to derive any competitive algorithm. An intriguing open question is whether there exists a scalable competitive algorithm that rejects a small fraction of total weights. In this paper, we affirmatively answer this question. Specifically, we show that there exists a O(1/epsilon^3)-competitive algorithm for minimizing weighted flow-time on a set of unrelated machine that rejects at most O(epsilon)-fraction of total weight of jobs. The design and analysis of the algorithm is based on the primal-dual technique. Our result asserts that alternative models beyond speed augmentation should be explored when designing online schedulers in the non-preemptive setting in an effort to find provably good algorithms.

We consider a single machine, a set of unit-time jobs, and a set of unit-time errors. We assume that the time-slot at which each error will occur is not known in advance but, for every error, there exists an uncertainty area during which the error will take place. In order to find if the error occurs in a specific time-slot, it is necessary to issue a query to it. In this work, we study two problems: (i) the error-query scheduling problem, whose aim is to reveal enough error-free slots with the minimum number of queries, and (ii) the lexicographic error-query scheduling problem where we seek the earliest error-free slots with the minimum number of queries. We consider both the off-line and the on-line versions of the above problems. In the former, the whole instance and its characteristics are known in advance and we give a polynomial-time algorithm for the error-query scheduling problem. In the latter, the adversary has the power to decide, in an on-line way, the time-slot of appearance for each error. We propose then both lower bounds and algorithms whose competitive ratios asymptotically match these lower bounds.

When a computer system schedules jobs there is typically a significant cost associated with preempting a job during execution. This cost can be from the expensive task of saving the memory's state and loading data into and out of memory. There is a need for non-preemptive system schedulers to avoid the costs of preemption on desktops, servers and data centers. Despite this need, there is a gap between theory and practice. Indeed, few non-preemptive online schedulers are known to have strong foundational guarantees. This gap is likely due to strong lower bounds on any online algorithm for popular objectives. Indeed, typical worst case analysis approaches, and even resource augmented approaches such as speed augmentation, result in all algorithms having poor performance guarantees. This paper considers online non-preemptive scheduling problems in the worst-case model where the algorithm is allowed to reject a small fraction of jobs. By rejecting only few jobs, this paper shows that the strong lower bounds can be circumvented. This model can be used to discover scheduling policies with desirable worst-case guarantees. Specifically, the paper presents algorithms for minimizing the total flow-time and minimizing the total weighted flow-time plus energy under the speed-scaling mechanism. The algorithms have a small constant competitive ratio while rejecting only a constant fraction of jobs. Beyond specific results, the paper asserts that alternative models beyond speed augmentation should be explored to aid in the discovery of good schedulers in the face of the requirement of being online and non-preemptive.

We address the fundamental tradeoff between deployment cost and service availability in the context of on-demand content delivery service provision over a telecom operator's network functions virtualization infrastructure. In particular, given a specific set of preferences and constraints with respect to deployment cost, availability and computing resource capacity, we provide polynomial-time heuristics for the problem of jointly deriving an appropriate assignment of computing resources to a set of virtual instances and the placement of the latter in a subset of the available physical hosts. We capture the conflicting criteria of service availability and deployment cost by proposing a multi-objective optimization problem formulation. Our algorithms are experimentally shown to outperform state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both execution time and optimality, while providing the system operator with the necessary flexibility to balance between conflicting objectives and reflect the relevant preferences of the customer in the produced solutions.

We present a new method for scheduling independent tasks on a parallel machine composed of identical processors. This problem has been studied extensively for a long time with many variants. We are interested here in designing a generic algorithm in the on-line non-preemptive setting whose performance is good for various objectives. The basic idea of this algorithm is to detect some problematic tasks that are responsible for the delay of other shorter tasks. Then the former tasks are redirected to be executed in a dedicated part of the machine. We show through an extensive experimental campaign that this method is effective and in most cases is closer to some standard lower bounds than the base-line method for the problem.

We focus on the problem of optimal compute resource allocation and placement for the provision of a virtualized Content Delivery Network (CDN) service over a telecom operator's Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure. Starting from a Quality of Experience (QoE)-driven decision on the necessary amount of CPU resources to allocate to satisfy a virtual CDN deployment request with QoE guarantees, we address the problem of distributing these resources to virtual machines and placing the latter to physical hosts, optimizing for the conflicting objectives of management cost and service availability, while respecting physical capacity, availability and cost constraints. We present a multi-objective optimization problem formulation, and provide efficient algorithms to solve it by relaxing some of the original problem's assumptions. Numerical results demonstrate how our solutions address the trade-off between service availability and cost, and show the benefits of our approach compared with resource placement algorithms which do not take this trade-off into account.

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of jobs, each one specified by its release date, its deadline and its processing volume, on a set of heterogeneous speed-scalable processors, where the energy-consumption rate is processor-dependent. Our objective is to minimize the total energy consumption when both the preemption and the migration of jobs are allowed. We propose a new algorithm based on a compact linear programming formulation. Our method approaches the value of the optimal solution within any desired accuracy for a large set of continuous power functions. Furthermore, we develop a faster combinatorial algorithm based on flows for standard power functions and jobs whose density is lower bounded by a small constant. Finally, we extend and analyze the AVerage Rate (AVR) online algorithm in the heterogeneous setting.

Resource augmentation is a well-established model for analyzing algorithms, particularly in the online setting. It has been successfully used for providing theoretical evidence for several heuristics in scheduling with good performance in practice. According to this model, the algorithm is applied to a more powerful environment than that of the adversary. Several types of resource augmentation for scheduling problems have been proposed up to now, including speed augmentation, machine augmentation and more recently rejection. In this paper, we present a framework that unifies the various types of resource augmentation. Moreover, it allows generalize the notion of resource augmentation for other types of resources. Our framework is based on mathematical programming and it consists of extending the domain of feasible solutions for the algorithm with respect to the domain of the adversary. This, in turn allows the natural concept of duality for mathematical programming to be used as a tool for the analysis of the algorithm's performance. As an illustration of the above ideas, we apply this framework and we propose a primal-dual algorithm for the online scheduling problem of minimizing the total weighted flow time of jobs on unrelated machines when the preemption of jobs is not allowed. This is a well representative problem for which no online algorithm with performance guarantee is known. Specifically, a strong lower bound of Omega(sqrt{n}) exists even for the offline unweighted version of the problem on a single machine. In this paper, we first show a strong negative result even when speed augmentation is used in the online setting. Then, using the generalized framework for resource augmentation and by combining speed augmentation and rejection, we present an (1+epsilon_s)-speed O(1/(epsilon_s epsilon_r))-competitive algorithm if we are allowed to reject jobs whose total weight is an epsilon_r-fraction of the weights of all jobs, for any epsilon_s > 0 and epsilon_r in (0,1). Furthermore, we extend the idea for analysis of the above problem and we propose an (1+\epsilon_s)-speed epsilon_r-rejection O({k^{(k+3)/k}}/{epsilon_{r}^{1/k}*epsilon_{s}^{(k+2)/k}})-competitive algorithm for the more general objective of minimizing the weighted l_k-norm of the flow times of jobs.

We consider the classical First Come First Served / backfilling algorithm which is commonly used in actual batch schedulers. As HPC platforms grow in size and complexity, an interesting question is how to enhance this algorithm in order to improve global performance by reducing the overall amount of communications. In this direction, we are interested in studying the impact of contiguity and locality allocation constraints on the behavior of batch scheduler. We provide a theoretical analysis of the cost of enforcing contiguity and locality properties. More specifically, we show that both properties do not impose strong limit on achievable make span performance while comparing feasible optimal solutions under different settings, we describe here the existing results on this topic and complete them with all combinations of constraints. We also propose a range of different allocation algorithms for backfilling by choosing between a strict or a soft enforcing of locality and contiguity. Our approach is validated through an extensive series of simulations based on batch scheduler traces. Experiments show that our algorithms do not increase the make span in average when comparing to actual practices. Interestingly, we observe that enforcing contiguity efficiently improves locality.

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of jobs, under precedence constraints, on a set of speed scalable parallel processors. The goal is to minimize the makespan of the schedule, i.e. the time at which the last job finishes its execution, without violating a given energy budget. This situation finds applications in computer devices whose lifetime depends on a limited battery efficiency. In order to handle the energy consumption we use the energy model introduced in [Yao et al., FOCS'95], which captures the intuitive idea that the higher is the processor's speed the higher is the energy consumption. We propose a (2-1/m)-approximation algorithm improving the best known poly-log(m)-approximation algorithm for the problem [Pruhs et al., TOCS 2008], where m is the number of the processors. We also extend the simple idea used for the above problem, in order to propose a generalized framework that finds applications to other scheduling problems in the speed scaling setting.

We propose a unifying framework based on configuration linear programs and randomized rounding, for different energy optimization problems in the dynamic speed-scaling setting. We apply our framework to various scheduling and routing problems in heterogeneous computing and networking environments. We first consider the energy minimization problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a set of parallel speed-scalable processors in a fully heterogeneous setting. For both the preemptive-non-migratory and the preemptive-migratory variants, our approach allows us to obtain solutions of almost the same quality as for the homogeneous environment. By exploiting the result for the preemptive-non-migratory variant, we are able to improve the best known approximation ratio for the single processor non-preemptive problem. Furthermore, we show that our approach allows to obtain a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the power-aware preemptive job shop scheduling problem. Finally, we consider the min-power routing problem where we are given a network modeled by an undirected graph and a set of uniform demands that have to be routed on integral routes from their sources to their destinations so that the energy consumption is minimized. We improve the best known approximation ratio for this problem.