• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.583-594
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• 1999

With the advance of VLSI and network technologies, it has now become a common practice to deploy a various forms of distributed computing environments. A study shows that a lot of network-aware computers are in an idle state for considerable amount of time depending on the types of users and time frames of the day. If we can take the full advantage of those idle computers, we can obtain the enormous combined processing power without further costly investment. In this paper, we present a distributed batch-processing system, called the Java Distributed Batch-processing System (JDBS), which allows us to execute CPU-intensive, independent jobs across a pool of idle workstations on top of extant distributed computing environments. Since JDBS is implemented using a Java programming language, it not only extends the scope of machine types that can be joined to the pool, but makes it a lot easier to build an entire system. Besides, JDBS is scalable and fault-tolerant due to its multi-cluster organization and intelligent strategies. A graphical user interface is also provided to facilitate the registration and unregistration, job submission, and job monitoring.