Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Introduction

Scheduling and load balancing are fundamental issues for deploying applications on parallel and distributed systems. Static and dynamic techniques, deterministic and stochastic methods have been researched to tackle the hard problem of achieving the minimum span and the optimal load balancing, making the best use of parallel and distributed systems by maintaining the resources busy and minimizing energy consumption. Although research has been done for years and years, namely for static scheduling and dynamic load balancing, these are old but very timely topics of research in the era of multicore computers and cloud computing. New challenges arise with the increased interest in applications with real-time constraints, the continuous growth of algorithms complexity and sophistication of applications, and the heterogeneity of systems and the diversity of their conditions of operation.