Collecting Unused Processing Capacity: An Analysis of Transient Distributed Systems

It is suggested that if the large numbers of idle computers and workstations in distributed systems could be used then considerable computing power could be harnessed at low cost. Such systems are analyzed using Brownian motion with drift to model the execution of a program distributed over the idle computers in a network of idle and busy processors. The ways in which the use of these transient processors affects a program's execution time is determined. The probability density of a program's finishing time on both single and multiple transient processors is found. These results are explored for qualitative insight. Some approximations for the finishing time probability density are suggested. >

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