Online Non-Preemptive Scheduling to Minimize Weighted Flow-time on Unrelated Machines

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the online problem of scheduling independent jobs \emph{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. %Using the speed augmentation model, Anand et al. showed that the greedy algorithm is $O\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\right)$-competitive in the preemptive setting. In the non-preemptive setting, Lucarelli et al. showed that there exists a strong lower bound for minimizing weighted flow-time even on a single machine. However, the problem in the non-preemptive setting admits a strong lower bound. Recently, Lucarelli et al. presented an algorithm that achieves a $O\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon^2}\right)$-competitive ratio when the algorithm is allowed to reject $\epsilon$-fraction of total weight of jobs and $\epsilon$-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 $O\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon^3}\right)$-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.