Finding idle machines in a workstation-based distributed system

The design and performance of scheduling facilities for finding idle hosts in a workstation-based distributed system are described. The focus is on the tradeoffs between centralized and decentralized architectures with respect to scalability, fault tolerance, and simplicity of design, as well as several implementation issues of interest when using multicast communication. It is concluded that the principal tradeoff between the two approaches is that a centralized architecture can be scaled to a significantly greater degree and can more easily monitor global system statistics, while a decentralized architecture is simpler to implement.<
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