Sharing in a privately owned workstation environment
Matt W. Mutka · 1988
Private workstations interconnected by networks have become widely available as sources of computing cycles. Each workstation is typically owned by a single user in order to provide a high quality of service for the owner. In most cases, an owner does not have computing demands as large as the capacity of the workstation. Therefore, most of the workstations are often under utilized. Nevertheless, some users have demands that exceed the capacities of their workstations. The desire to satisfy the requirements of users who need extra capacity without lowering the quality of service of owners of under utilized workstations raises the following challenging question: Can we provide a high quality of service in a highly utilized workstation cluster? The problem identified by this question is how to share workstation capacity with minimal interferencewith the local activity of workstation owners. This thesis addresses this problem of capacity sharing by exploring issues involved with the formation of a processor from a workstation cluster. The capacity of the processor bank comes from the donation of workstations during periods that the stations are not used During periods of usage, the workstations are withdrawn from the processor bank. We examined the amount of capacity available for donation, and the characteristics of the donation and withdrawal periods. A design