Mechanisms and policies for supporting fine-grained cycle stealing

This paper presents an investigation into local mechanisms and scheduling policies that allow guest processes to efficiently exploit otherwise-idle workstation resources. Unlike traditional policies that harvest cycles only from unused machines, we target policies that exploit resources even from machines that have active users. We present a set of kernel extensions that allow these policies to operate without significantly impacting host processes: 1) a new guest process priority that prevents processes from stealing any processor time from host processes, 2) a new page replacement policy that imposes hard bounds on the number of physical pages that can be obtained by guest processes when host processes are active, and 3) a new page-out strategy that adaptively increases the pageout rate of guest processes when new host processes are started. We evaluate both the individual impacts of each mechanism, and their utility in supporting Linger-Longer, an aggressive cycleharvesting policy....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Kyung Dong Ryu, Jeffrey K. Hollingsworth, Peter J. Keleher
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Guest Processes, Host Processes, ICS 1999, Policies