Co-scheduling compute-intensive tasks on a network of workstations: model and algorithms

The problem of using the idle cycles of a number of high-performance workstations, interconnected by a high-speed network, for solving computationally intensive tasks is discussed. The classes of distributed applications examined require some form of synchronization among the sub-tasks, hence the need for coscheduling to guarantee that sub-tasks start at the same time and execute at the same pace on a group of workstations. A model of the system that allows the definition of an objective function to be maximized is presented. Then a quadratic time and linear space algorithm is derived for computing the optimal coscheduling