Advances in hardware and software technologies have led to an increased interest in the use of large-scale parallel and distributed systems for database, real-time, defense, and large-scale commercial applications. One of the biggest system issues is developing effective techniques for the distribution of multiple program processes on multiple processors. This book discusses how to schedule the processes among processing elements to achieve the expected performance goals, such as minimizing execution time, minimizing communication delays, or maximizing resource utilization.

This book focuses on the future directions of the static scheduling and dynamic load balancing methods in parallel and distributed systems. It provides an overview and a detailed discussion on a wide range of topics from theoretical background to practical, state-of-the-art scheduling and load balancing techniques.

The book will be a useful guide to industry professionals, academic professors, and students who are interested in these important aspects of parallel and distributed systems. Also, it will be helpful to those working on research and development in parallel processing applications, compilers and operating systems, system design, and software tools for parallel program development.