'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
Exploiting computational resources within an organisation
for more than their primary task offers great
benefits – making better use of capital expenditure and provides
a pool of computational power. This can be achieved through
the deployment of a cycle stealing distributed system, where
tasks execute during the idle time on computers. However,
if a task has not completed when a computer returns to its
primary function the task will be preempted, wasting time
(and energy), and is often reallocated to a new resource in
an attempt to complete. This becomes exacerbated when tasks
are incapable of completing due to excessive execution time or
faulty hardware / software, leading to a situation where tasks
are perpetually reallocated between computers – wasting time
and energy. In this work we investigate techniques to increase
the chance of ‘good’ tasks completing whilst curtailing the
execution of ‘bad’ tasks. We demonstrate, through simulation,
that we could have reduce the energy consumption of our cycle
stealing system by approximately 50%