The paper describes a technique for estimating the minimum execution time of an algorithm or a mix of algorithms on a distributed processing system. Bottlenecks that would have to be removed to further reduce the execution time are identified. The main applications are for the high level design of special purpose distributed processing systems. The distributed systems are modelled by P t a set of nonidentical processors and R, a set of resources that the processors can use. The algorithms are

more »

... delled by T, an ordered set of tasks. The problem of optimally assigning the processors to the tasks while meeting the resource constraints i-s N'P-complete, However, a heuristic using maximum weighted retchings on graphs has been devised that Is extrerr.ely fast and comes reasonably close to the optimal solutions.