The Design of the Schizophrenic Workstation System

A cycle-harvesting distributed operating system is described. Building upon current kernelized operating system technology, it promises to utilize spare workstation resources for large, long-running applications, while subjecting the workstation owner/user to little inconvenience. The design is based on a novel use of the multiple-personality potential of microkernel-based operating systems. Acceptance of the system by workstation owners is encouraged by utilizing new and existing resource management mechanisms within the kernel to minimize the impact on those owners' local systems. The applications of interest may display medium-grained concurrent/parallel behavior, or they may utilize process-level parallelism, or they may simply be long-running, compute intensive, non-completion-time-critical single-threaded programs.