This paper presents MULTIFIT-COM, a static task allocator which could be incorporated into an automated compiler/linker/loader for distributed processing systems. The allocator uses performance information for the processes making up the system in order to determine an appropriate mapping of tasks onto processors. It uses several heuristic extensions of the MULTIFIT bin-packing algorithm to nd an allocation that will o er a high system throughput, taking into account the expected execution and interprocessor communication requirements of the software on the given hardware architecture. Throughput is evaluated by an asymptotic bound for saturated conditions and under an assumption that only processing resources are required. A set of options are proposed for each of the allocator's major steps. An evaluation was made on 680 small randomly generated examples. Using all the search options, an average performance di erence of just over 1% was obtained. Using a carefully chosen small subset of only four options, a further degradation of just over 1.5% was obtained. The allocator is also applied to a digital signal processing system consisting of 119 tasks to illustrate its clustering and load balancing properties on a large system.