23. Looking Ahead

As stated in the introduction, the sheer volume of excellent research on various aspects of multiprocessor scheduling theory meant that we could not possibly hope to detail, or even mention in passing, all the important and interesting results. Instead, we have selected a self-contained collection of topics from the vast body of research literature on multiprocessor real-time scheduling theory, and have attempted to provide a cohesive, relatively deep, and complete coverage of these topics. Our choice of topics for inclusion was primarily guided by their relevance to the discipline, the maturity of our knowledge about them, and the requirement that all taken together, they should comprise a complete narrative for a substantial and important subset of multiprocessor real-time scheduling theory. In addition, our personal preferences, biases, and expertise undoubtedly played a role in determining which topics got into this book, and which stayed out. In any event, there are many important aspects of multiprocessor real-time scheduling theory that did not see much discussion in this book; we briefly list some such topics in this chapter.