Patent ID: 8370495

Claim:
An on-demand compute environment comprising: a processor; and a computer-readable storage medium having stored therein instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform a method comprising: receiving instructions from a master management module in an external compute environment separate from the on-demand compute environment to yield received instructions, the external compute environment configured to receive workload for processing on external compute nodes from users via reservation of the external compute nodes, and the on-demand compute environment having on-demand compute nodes available for provisioning and processing workload via reservation of the on-demand compute nodes under a slave management module, and wherein the on-demand compute environment is not a video on-demand server; creating a new management module on one of the on-demand compute nodes based on the received instructions, wherein the new management module provisions at least one other compute node to be managed by the new management module to yield a provisioned at last one other compute node; and receiving workload for processing from the external compute environment and causing the workload to consume the provisioned at least one other compute node, wherein the new management module operates in addition to the slave management module only for a duration of the workload that consumes the provisioned at least one other compute node.