Supporting parallel processing on the RHODOS cluster of workstations

With the move towards parallel processing on Clusters of Workstations (COWs) the ability to fully utilise the computational resources of all workstations through the initial placement and movement of workload is desirable by the user of the system, to improve the overall performance. This is a critical task when many users run their parallel programs simultaneously. The ability to have an even spread of load over an entire COW can be achieved through the employment of Global Scheduling. This paper introduces the concept of global scheduling exploiting static allocation and dynamic load balancing along with the implementation of such a facility and support services, remote process creation and process migration, respectively, on the RHODOS distributed operating system. The suitability of the RHODOS implementation is demonstrated by results obtained from initial test runs of a SPMD parallel application.