As it turned out, the 'effective CPU' was nearly the same as with the set processors. Recently Tafti and Huang increased the system's portability. Originally their computational power-balancing system was limited to Origin machines. That changed with the OpenMP standard for shared memory, which became available last year. A trickier issue to resolve will be operating policy.
Most researchers compute on tightly scheduled supercomputers.
Spare processors may not be available when applications require them. Institutions that allocate computing cycles will need to develop policies that accommodate fluctuating demands for processors within a single calculation. Tafti and Huang will defer that issue to others. Policy issues aside, the potential benefits to researchers are enormous, says Tafti. The bottom line is that computational power balancing provides more freedom and flexibility in computations.