Making Workstations a Friendly Environment for Batch Jobs

As time-sharing machines are replaced by powerful desktop computers and farms of workstations replace mainframes, more and more users turn to workstations when they need CPU cycles for their batch jobs. Unfortunately, they do not find workstations a very friendly environment for batch processing. Since these types of machines were originally designed as a single user environment, they lack most of the batch oriented features that are provided by almost any mainframe. In the past six years we have been working on the Condor batch system. The main objective of Condor has been to provide batch users with easy and reliable access to available cycles on UNIX workstations. A pool of more than 250 workstations is currently controlled by a Condor system in our department. Other Condor pools provide batch services at a wide range of academic and industrial settings. In the course of our work with UNIX workstations as providers of batch cycles we have composed a list of services that we think should be provided by the Operating System. In this paper we present the main services on this list and argue that they should be supported by all workstations.