Constructing Distributed Schedulers Using the MESSIAHS Interface Language

The messiahs project is investigating mechanisms that support task placement in heterogeneous, distributed, autonomous systems. messiahs provides a substrate on which scheduling algorithms can be implemented. These mechanisms were designed to support diverse task placement and load balancing algorithms. As part of this work, we have constructed an interface layer to the underlying mechanisms. This includes the messiahs Interface Language (MIL) for constructing distributed schedulers. This paper gives an overview of messiahs, describes a sample interface layer in detail, and gives example implementations of well-known algorithms from the literature built using this layer. ∗This work was sponsored in part by NASA GSRP grant number NGT 50919.