The authors examine the nonpreemptive assignment of n independent tasks to a system of m uniform processors with the objective of reducing the makespan, or the time required from the start of execution until all tasks are completed. Since the problem of finding a minimal makespan has been shown to be np-hard, and hence unlikely to permit an efficient solution procedure, near-optimal heuristic algorithms have been studied. It is known that lpt (longest processing time first) schedules are within twice the length of the optimum. They analyze a variation of the multifit algorithm derived from bin packing, and prove that its worst case performance bound is within 1.4 of the optimum. 10 references.