Scheduling large-scale parallel computations on networks of workstations

Workstation networks are an underutilized yet valuable resource for solving large-scale parallel problems. In this paper, we present “idle-initiated” techniques for efficiently scheduling large-scale parallel computations on workstation networks. By “idle-initiated”, we mean that idle computers actively search out work to do rather than wait for work to be assigned. The idle-initiated scheduler operates at both the macro and the micro levels. On the macro level, a computer without work joins an ongoing parallel computation as a participant. On the micro level, a participant without work “steals” from some other participant of the same computation. We have implemented these scheduling techniques in Phish, a portable system for running dynamic parallel applications on a network of workstations