Strategies for exploiting the resources of a privately owned workstation cluster while insuring little or no interference to the owners of workstations are being developed. By building a simulation environment that takes advantage of the usage characteristics of workstation owners, improvements of the quality of service is enjoyed by all users. The system will enable users to submit project descriptions of simulation models to the system from which they will receive graphical displays of the results. The project descriptions include a specification of the simulation jobs to be executed, the time constraints of the project, and characteristics of the jobs. An important feature to be developed and evaluated is the system's deadline-driven scheduling facility. Simulation jobs will be scheduled to meet the deadlines of the time constraints imposed on the jobs. In addition, the scheduler will allow users to be allocated partitions of idle workstations for developing distributed applications. In order to provide scheduling strategies for meeting deadlines and allocating partitions of idle workstations, workload models of the usage characteristics of workstations are being developed.
