A job scheduling system implementation and its performance evaluation

The authors discuss a scheduling system implemented on a network of 12 AT&T 3B2 microcomputers, running a transport distributed operating system, the Loadable Illinois Networked Kernal (LINK). It is noted that the design overhead for a scheduling system built as part of an existing distributing computer system is very small compared to the design of the operating system itself. Moreover, an implementation allows one to answer many questions concerning load balancing problems that cannot be answered (or cannot be answered precisely) by queuing network models or simulation. The hardware and software environments are described together with the scheduler. Several experiments were performed to test the job scheduling system and it was found that substantial performance increases are possible compared to systems without a job scheduling system