Processor sharing for cooperative multi-task applications

A processor sharing system allows busy users in a networked environment to take advantage of the processing power of idle machines. Experimental systems have demonstrated the usefulness of the concept, but processor sharing has yet to achieve widespread acceptance. Simplistic sharing policies and programming difficulty are two factors that combine to limit the use and acceptance of processor sharing. Group management, a new approach to processor sharing presented here, addresses these problems. Group management is designed to support processor sharing applications that consist of multiple cooperating tasks. This new approach provides a framework for the development of sophisticated sharing policies that can support a variety of applications with differing execution characteristics. In addition, it provides services to programmers that ease the task of writing programs for, and running programs in, a processor sharing environment. This dissertation introduces group management and describes its implementation in the ARCADE distributed system. In addition, a number of processor sharing applications that have been implemented and used in ARCADE are discussed.