Gang scheduling a parallel machine. Revision 1

Program development on parallel machines can be a nightmare of scheduling headaches. We have developed a portable time sharing mechanism to handle the problem of scheduling gangs of processes. User programs and their gangs of processes are put to sleep and awakened by the gang scheduler to provide a time sharing environment. Time quantum are adjusted according to priority queues and a system of fair share accounting. The initial platform for this software is the 128 processor BBN TC2000 in use in the Massively Parallel Computing Initiative at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.