A programmable Java distributed system, which
adapts to available resources, has been developed to minimise the
overall processing time of computationally intensive problems.
The system exploits the free resources of a heterogeneous set of computers
linked together by a network, communicating using
SUN Microsystems' Remote Method Invocation and Java sockets.
It uses a multi-tiered distributed system model, which in principal allows for a system of unbounded size.
The system consists of an n-ary tree of
nodes where the internal nodes perform the scheduling and the
leaves do the processing. The scheduler nodes communicate in a
peer-to-peer manner and the processing nodes operate in a strictly
client-server manner with their respective scheduler. The
independent schedulers on each tier of the tree dynamically allocate resources
between problems based on the constantly changing characteristics
of the underlying network. The system has been evaluated over a network of 86
PCs with a bioinformatics application and the travelling salesman
optimisation problem
