Workstation autonomy is a dead issue

Two significant questions relating to workstation autonomy are control of resources and control of information. It is argued that in light of developing technology these factors will become increasingly irrelevant over the next decade, and that work will be possible from anonymous workstations with the computation load split appropriately between one or more processors local to the workstation and additional processors available via the network. It will be essential that writing programs for this environment be as straightforward as possible. Scheduling of work across such a distributed system will involve both global decisions (process placement and migration) and local ones. In computer servers with heavily cached memory systems, the appropriate granularity for local scheduling will be coarser than for interactive workstations. This raises issues not only for the local scheduler, but also for the application partitioning tools