Preemptable Remote Execution Facilities for the V-System.
Abstract
A remote execution facility allows a user of a workstation-based distributed computer system to offload programs onto idle workstations, thereby providing the user with access to computational resources beyond that provided by his personal workstation. This paper, describes the design and performance of the remote execution facility in the V distributed system, as well as several implementation issues of interest. In particular, the authors focus on network transparency of the execution environment, preemption and migration of remotely executed programs, and avoidance of residual dependencies on the original host. It is agreed that preemptable remote execution allows idle workstations to be used as a pool of processors without interfering with use by their owners and without significant overhead for the normal execution of programs. In general, it is concluded that the cost of providing preemption is modest compared to providing a similar amount of computation service by dedicated computation engines. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1985
- Accession Number
- ADA166948
Entities
People
- David R. Cheriton
- Keith A. Lantz
- Marvin . Theimer
Organizations
- Stanford University