A tool for isolating performance in general-purpose operating systems

General-purpose Operating Systems do not provide effective mechanisms for application processing reservation. For this reason, some initiatives aim at guaranteeing processing by instrumenting kernels or by isolating the performance through the creation of virtual machines. As will be described in the present paper, CPUReserve works differently from these approaches. It is a processing reservation system that runs at user level. Because CPUReserve presents a client-server architecture and significant scalability -- as suggested by the experiments carried out -- it can be used in distributed and shared environments just like computational grids.