Efficient Approximation Algorithms for Scheduling Coflows with Precedence Constraints in Identical Parallel Networks to Minimize Weighted Completion Time

This paper focuses on the problem of coflow scheduling with precedence constraints in identical parallel networks, which is a well-known $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problem. Coflow is a relatively new network abstraction used to characterize communication patterns in data centers. Both flow-level scheduling and coflow-level scheduling problems are examined, with the key distinction being the scheduling granularity. The proposed algorithm effectively determines the scheduling order of coflows by employing the primal-dual method. When considering workload sizes and weights that are dependent on the network topology in the input instances, our proposed algorithm for the flow-level scheduling problem achieves an approximation ratio of $O(χ)$ where $χ$ is the coflow number of the longest path in the directed acyclic graph (DAG). Additionally, when taking into account workload sizes that are topology-dependent, the algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(Rχ)$, where $R$ represents the ratio of maximum weight to minimum weight. For the coflow-level scheduling problem, the proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(mχ)$, where $m$ is the number of network cores, when considering workload sizes and weights that are topology-dependent. Moreover, when considering workload sizes that are topology-dependent, the algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(Rmχ)$. In the coflows of multi-stage job scheduling problem, the proposed algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of $O(χ)$. Although our theoretical results are based on a limited set of input instances, experimental findings show that the results for general input instances outperform the theoretical results, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed algorithm.