[ont.events] Collecting Unused Processing Capacity: An Analysis of Transient Distributed Systems

vrsyrotiuk@water.waterloo.edu (Violet Syrotiuk) (03/23/89)

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR

                    - Thursday, March 30, 1989

Mr.  Willard  Korfhage,  of  the Department of Computer
Science,  University of California at Los Angeles, will
speak  on  ``Collecting  Unused Processing Capacity: An
Analysis of Transient Distributed Systems''.

TIME:                3:30 PM

ROOM:                DC 1304



ABSTRACT

Networks of computers are fairly common in business and
research  environments throughout the world. Originally
motivated  by a desire to ease data and device sharing,
many networks have grown in speed and sophistication to
the  point that distributed processing can be performed
on them. A typical example is that of workstations on a
high-speed,   local   area   network   in   a  research
laboratory.  Not  only  are  there  many machines, well
connected  by  the network, but the users are likely to
demand more and more computing power.

On  these  networks,  we  often have the situation that
many  of  the  personal  computers and workstations are
sitting  idle,  waiting for their users, and thus being
wasted. If we could recover this wasted time for useful
processing,  then we would  have considerable computing
power  available  to  us at low cost. We refer to these
processors, which are sometimes busy and sometimes not,
as transient processors.

In  this  talk  we  develop  a  model  of  a network of
transient  processors.  First  we  examine a program in
isolation,  to  determine  how  the  use  of  transient
processors  affects  its  service time, and then we use
this  to  develop  queueing  models of the network as a
whole.
-- 
Violet R. Syrotiuk     |                                   vrsyrotiuk@water.uucp
Computer Science Dept. |                                watmath!water!vrsyrotiuk
University of Waterloo |                           vrsyrotiuk@water.uwaterloo.ca
Waterloo, ON  N2L 3G1  |                 vrsyrotiuk@water.waterloo.edu (or .cdn)