The design and development of a distributed scheduler agent

The main objective of the distributed scheduler agent is to provide task placement advice either to parallel and distributed applications directly, or to a distributed scheduler which will despatch normal applications transparently to the advised hosts. To accomplish this, the distributed scheduler agent needs to know the global load situation across all machines and be able to pick the host which best suits the specific resource requirements of individual jobs. Issues concerning the collecting and distribution of load information throughout the system are discussed. This load information is then fed to a ranking algorithm which uses a 3-dimensional load space to generate the most suitable host based on weights which indicate the relative importance of resources to a task. Performance tests are carried out to determine the response times and overhead of the distributed scheduler agent. An application, a distributed ray tracer, is also customised to make use of the distributed scheduler agent and the results presented.