Preemptive scheduling with dedicated processors: applications of fractional graph coloring

We study the problem of scheduling independent multiprocessor tasks, where for each task in addition to the processing time(s) there is a prespecified dedicated subset (or a family of alternative subsets) of processors which are required to process the task simultaneously. Focusing on problems where all required (alternative) subsets of processors have the same fixed cardinality, we present complexity results for computing preemptive schedules with minimum makespan closing the gap between computationally tractable and intractable instances. In particular, we show that for the dedicated version of the problem, optimal preemptive schedules of bi-processor tasks (i.e., tasks whose dedicated processor sets are all of cardinality two) can be computed in polynomial time. We give various extensions of this result including one to maximum lateness minimization with release times and due dates. All these results are based on a nice relation between preemptive scheduling and fractional coloring of graphs. In contrast to the positive results, we also prove that the problems of computing optimal preemptive schedules for three-processor tasks or for bi-processor tasks with (possible several) alternative modes are strongly NP-hard.