Finding idle machines in a workstation-based distributed system

Author

Theimer, Marvin M. ; Lantz, Keith A.

Author_Institution

Xerox Palo Alto Res. Center, CA, USA

Volume

15

Issue

11

fYear

1989

fDate

11/1/1989 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1444

Lastpage

1458

Abstract

The authors describe the design and performance of scheduling facilities for finding idle hosts in a workstation-based distributed system. They focus on the tradeoffs between centralized and decentralized architectures with respect to scalability, fault tolerance, and simplicity of design, as well as several implementation issues of interest when multicast communication is used. They conclude that the principal tradeoff between the two approaches is that a centralized architecture can be scaled to a significantly greater degree and can more easily monitor global system statistics whereas a decentralized architecture is simpler to implement

Keywords

distributed processing; scheduling; centralized architecture; decentralized architectures; design simplicity; fault tolerance; global system statistics; idle hosts; idle machines; multicast communication; performance; scalability; scheduling facilities; workstation-based distributed system; Computer architecture; Computerized monitoring; Distributed computing; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Multicast communication; Remote monitoring; Scalability; Statistical distributions; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.41336

Filename

41336