Dynamic Load Distribution with the WINNER System

Networks of workstationsoffer large amounts of idle computing capacities. Exploitingthese resources imposes the problem of efficiently distributing a given workload without disturbing the workstations’ primary (console) users. Recently, specific resource management systems have been developed for this purpose [1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14]. This paper presents WINNER, a resource management system which has been designed in order to utilize the maximal amount of computing power, imperceptible even by active console users. WINNER automatically assigns tasks to suitable machines, supporting sequential as well as parallel applications, the latter based on PVM [3]. WINNER’s modular structure as well as its mechanisms for monitoring and distributing workload will be presented. Performance measurements of a sample PVM application indicate the suitability of our approach.