Abstract
Networks of powerful workstations are much more popular than large mainframes, or even supercomputers. But it is very hard to gain good utilisation of network. The purpose of connecting workstations together as a Fair Metacomputer (FMC) is to give unused power of application-users to power users. Metacomputer by definition takes care of distributing parts of parallel programs over the network and communication among them. FMC makes a step forward. It tries to be as fair as possible to all users. It uses only idle workstations for tasks execution. When an idle workstation becomes busy (user returned to work), tasks migrate to other idle workstations.
FMC can be used in any computer network, where intensive calculations take place. It is especially useful in areas, where problems can be paralleled — divided in few parts, that run at the same time (chemistry, physics, mathematics, ...).
Another function of FMC is important. When a workstation is suddenly shotdown, or crashed, programs are not lost. At start-up, programs will run from where they were interrupted. Only a small part of computation is lost.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Zrimsek, A., Smukavec, T. (1994). Fair metacomputer — FMC. In: Dongarra, J., Waśniewski, J. (eds) Parallel Scientific Computing. PARA 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 879. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0030182
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0030182
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