Dynamic process management for avoiding the confliction between the development of a program and a job for producing animation frames

Distributed processing systems which consist of multiple graphics workstations (GWSs) are being used in many computer graphics laboratories (CG labs). This paper proposes a method for improving the operation efficiency at a CG lab by avoiding the conflict between a job for producing animation frames with no human interaction and the development of a program which needs some interaction by a human. That is, concerning the jobs being executed on a UNIX workstation, long-time jobs like the former and short-time jobs like the latter are detected. Based on the result of the detection, the status of the process for producing animation frames is controlled to be either "sleeping" or "running", automatically in a short time. The process control functions on a standard UNIX system are statically controlled by using the priority of a process. The system is restricted as follows: once a process starts executing, there is no way to control the process from outside of it. The proposed method removes this restriction, i.e. the status of the process for producing animation frames is controlled dynamically. By using the proposed method, an animation can be produced on a GWS in a short period without lowering the efficiency of the other jobs, like the development of a program in a CG lab.