Killer Micro Question

[Alan Weiss]

In article <16364 at s.ms.uky.edu> randy at ms.uky.edu (Randy Appleton) writes:
>I have been wondering how hard it would be to set up several 
>of the new fast workstations as one big Mainframe.  For instance,
>imagine some SPARCstations/DECstations set up in a row, and called
>compute servers.  Each one could handle several users editing/compiling/
>debugging on glass TTY's, or maybe one user running X.
>
>But how does each user, who is about to log in, know which machine to
>log into?  He ought to log into the one with the lowest load average, yet
>without logging on cannot determine which one that is.
.......

You are referring to Process Transparency (which actually can be
implemented at the task, process, or thread level).  The leaders
in this kind of work are Locus Computing Corp. in Inglewood and
Freedomnet in North Carolina.  LCC's product, the Locus Operating
System, formed the basis for IBM Corp.'s Transparent Computing
Facility (TCF), which allowed for a distributed, heterogeneous,
transparent filesystem AND process system.  It was first implemented
back in the early 1980's on VAXen, Series 1's, and 370's.  The first
commericial product, AIX/370 and AIX/PS/2 (386) offer TCF.

(I used to work for Locus, but have no commerical interest currently).

For more information, contact IBM or Locus Computing - 213-670-6500,
and mention TCF.

As an aside, watching process execute with or without user knowledge
as to execution location, as well as watching processes migrate
while executing to other systems, is Neat.  Wanna run that
geological survey program?  Let /*fast*/ find the quickest site!


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