The objective of this study is to establish the foundation for Osculant, a bottom-up resource scheduler which is inherently suitable for heterogeneous information processing systems consisting of an arbitrary mix of processors, operating systems, application programs, and network topologies. The specific objectives of the Osculant ITO project are to derive a theoretical foundation for Osculant, to establish a methodology to define and validate task bidding schema, and to study experimentally the performance of Osculant as a function of load parameters and physical environment. Approach At the core of an Osculant system is a bottom-up resource scheduler which requires the computational nodes of a heterogeneous system compete for tasks using a competitive bidding policy. Processors bid on jobs in order to maximize their local profit which can be correlated to computer resources and energy expended, or temporal metrics.
Processors have no knowledge of other submitted bids and operate completely autonomously.
The dispatcher, called a steward, awards tasks to the processor with the best bid. Unlike a traditional scheduler, Osculant has no central control. Top-down would be used whenever emergency control of the system needs to be asserted by an outside agent or event. The system behavior can dynamically range between these extremes. Hence, an Osculant scheduler can be imposed on a new or existing computing systems.