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.