ylfink@water.UUCP (05/26/87)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
SYSTEMS SEMINAR
- Friday, May 29, 1987
Professor G.C. Shoja of the University of Victoria will
speak on ``Extending the Computational Bandwidth of
Engineering Workstations''.
TIME: 1:30 PM
ROOM: MC 6091A
ABSTRACT
While the workstation model of computing is becoming
more predominant, the state of art in technology is
pushing the processing power of some of these
engineering workstations beyond the 5 MIPS range. A
network of such powerful engineering workstations
provides enormous source of computing power.
Statistically, however, only a small fraction of this
processing power is generally utilized and the rest is
simply wasted. Ideally, the user of a workstation
should be able to tap the idle processing power of
other workstations to speed up the execution of a large
cpu intensive job or several large computations.
This talk will try to address the above issues by
presenting overviews of two systems which deal with
parallel processing potentials and load sharing in a
network of engineering workstations from two different
perspectives. First, DMTS (a distributed multitasking
system) uses a high level concurrent language and its
special runtime support system to achieve network
transparency. In the second project, a distributed
facility called REM (Remote Execution Manager) is
implemented entirely at the application layer and
enables the user of a workstation to setup parallel
execution of components of a job on remote
workstations. Parallel execution of replicated
processes is used to achieve failure transparency.
This system is being implemented on a network of Sun 3
-
workstations running Berkeley Unix.
Some performance data will be presented and the major
research problems will be discussed.