Stealth: A Liberal Approach to Distributed Scheduling for Networks of Workstations

Over the past several years, distributed systems composed of computer workstations have become common. To make full use of their often enormous aggregate computing capacity, distributed schedulers must be developed that are appropriate to the unique features of these systems. In this paper, we show that the approach (referred to as conservative) commonly used by distributed schedulers designed for such systems is both unduly costly and fails to exploit large portions of their computing capacities. The goal of the Stealth Distributed Scheduler is to explore a liberal approach to distributed scheduling in this environment. We discuss the design and performance of Stealth, showing that it is better able to exploit computing capacity, yet incurs less overhead than conservative distributed schedulers.