Abstract. This paper is concerned with scheduling when the data are not fully known before the execution. In that case computing a complete schedule off-line with estimated data may lead to poor performances. Some flexibility must be added to the scheduling process.
We propose to start from a partial schedule and to postpone the complete scheduling until execution, thus introducing what we call a stabilization scheme. This is applied to the m machine problem with communication delays: in our model an estimation of the delay is known at compile time; but disturbances due to network contention, link failures,... may occur at execution time. Hence the processor assignment and a partial sequencing on each processor are determined off-line.
Some theoretical results for tree-like precedence constraints and an experimental study show the interest of this approach compared with fully on-line scheduling.
 

Keywords: Parallel Computing, Scheduling with Communication Delays, Disturbances on Communication Delays, List Scheduling, Flexibility.