This paper considers the single machine scheduling problem with linear earliness and quadratic tardiness costs. The research on the version with inserted idle time focused on an exact approach, while several heuristics had already been proposed for the version with no idle time. These heuristics were then the basis for the development of new heuristic procedures for the version with idle time. ...

Workstation networks are an underutilized yet valuable resource for solving large-scale parallel problems. In this paper, we present \idle-initiated" techniques for eeciently scheduling large-scale parallel computations on workstation networks. By \idle-initiated," we mean that idle computers actively search out work to do rather than wait for work to be assigned. The idle-initiated scheduler o...

Distributed systems frequently have large numbers of idle computers and workstations. If we could make use of these, then considerable computing power could be harnessed at low cost. We analyze such systems using Brownian motion with drift to model the execution of a program distributed over the idle computers in a network of idle and busy processors, determining how the use of these “transient...

Most efforts at low-cost parallel computing assume a monopoly on the hardware being used. That all-or-nothing attitude ignores many machines dedicated to other activities, but which sit idle for 16 hours a day. However, naı̈ve attempts to utilize idle machines can interfere with their primary purpose. This paper describes the successful effort to unobtrusively farm idle machines, for an artifici...

We consider an M/M/N/K/FCFS system (N > 0, K ≥N), where the servers operate at (possibly) heterogeneous service rates. In this situation, the steady state behavior depends on the routing policy that is used to select which idle server serves the next job in queue. We define a class of idle-time-order-based policies (including, for example, Longest Idle Server First (LISF)) and show that all pol...

Although insert sort takes quadratic time in the worst case it has a very efficient inner loop. Its bestcase computing time is linear, which occurs when the data are already in sorted order. It is the method of choice for data stored in linked lists or small arrays. Algorithm 1 is typical, and is written in extended Pascal. Implementing the conditional 'cand' operation (to guard against the err...

Kinetic equations describing ligation of DNA to circular recombinant forms were developed and solved for four types of reactions: (a) a homogeneous population of singly restricted DNA fragments, (b) insertion of singly restricted insert into vector, (c) forced directional insertion of doubly restricted insert into vector, and (d) insertion of singly restricted insert into phosphatased vector. T...