Adapting to load on workstation clusters

Abstract

Desktop workstations represent a largely untapped source of computational power for parallel computing. Two of the main problems in utilizing these workstations are developing strategies for migrating load so that partially loaded workstations can contribute CPU cycles to the computation, and making dynamically migratable application programs easy to write. This paper describes object arrays, a construct which makes dynamically migratable applications easier to write, and a simple strategy for migrating load on a workstation cluster.