Osculant is a new class of bottom-up task scheduler for heterogeneous computing environment. The programs being executed send messages to a higher level entity called steward which interprets these requests in terms of executable objects and posts them on a job board along with salient information about data location, resource requirements, job priority, and so forth. When a job is posted, all processors bid on that job. Processors bid on jobs in order to maximize their profit in terms of cycles of work and overhead.
Processors have no knowledge of other bids and operate autonomously.
The dispatcher awards tasks to the processor with the best bid. Based on these rules, an Osculant system can be seen to be completely self-scheduling . Here is an analogy of taxi service in a large metropolitan area. An Osculant shell is developed which runs on a heterogeneous group of computers connected through a network. This multilayer shell allows easy implementation and performance measurement of different bidding algorithms.