There are times when high-end workstations, especially those that run multitasking and multiuser operating systems, are grossly under-used, while a selected few are heavily-loaded, thus resulting in poor performance and response times. As workstations are a relatively expensive resource, it would make sense for the heavily-loaded workstations to be able to utilize the processing power of the idle or lightly-loaded workstations. In order to overcome this drawback, researchers in the Network Research Group (NRG) at the University of Science Malaysia (USM) have decided to create a load distribution system. The LOADIST system is USM's distributed processing environment. It is created to run on top of the SUN and Solaris operating systems. The LOADIST system creates this distributed processing environment by executing an application on the most idle networked client workstation, based on its average CPU load. Future developments include creating distributed tools, and also porting the LOADIST system to the Solaris x86 and PowerPC systems as well.
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