A Statistical Study of the Performance of a Task Scheduling Algorithm

In this note we report the results of an experimental investigation on the performance of the very simple level scheduling algorithm for unit time task systems. Although the problem of the construction of optimal k-processor schedules for unit time tasks is NP-complete, the experimental study suggests that this efficient linear time algorithm can produce optimal schedules most of the time in the sense that the probability of producing an optimal schedule using this efficient linear time algorithm is at least 0.9 for over 700 cases randomly constructed in our experiment.