🚀 go-pugleaf

I am involved in a project whose goal is to develop a system for
scheduling batch and interactive jobs in a network of UNIX
workstations.  The goal is for users to be able to submit jobs and
have our system decide the best place to run those jobs.  The system
should take into account factors like expected CPU usage of the job
vs. power of the host, the location of the input and output files of
the job vs. the server locations on the network, expected memory usage
of the job vs. the memory and swap size on the host, etc.  We do not
have to deal with process migration - once jobs are assigned to a
host, they stay there.

I would like to know if there are systems out there which already
solve this problem.  Currently I have information about the Network
Queueing System (Sterling Software) and Load Balancer (Freedman Sharp
and Associates).  NQS is public domain software, but unfortunately for
our purposes it is not satisfactory because it only deals with
queueing, not load balancing.  Load Balancer performs most of the
functions we want, but is a commercial product, which brings up other
issues such as licensing, not to mention paying for the thing in the
first place. :-)

I currently have a reasonable set of papers dealing with load
balancing, but would appreciate pointers to recent papers (1991 and
on).

Thanks in advance.
Brian

Brian Schack				schack@arc.ab.ca
Alberta Research Council
Advanced Computing and Engineering Dept.
Calgary, Alberta			ph:  (403) 297-7566