NCSA NEWS

Symera does its magic by borrowing processors that aren't being used within a computer lab, an office, or any single NT domain. It monitors the networked machines and, when they aren't being used, makes them available to run Symera applications. Like Condor, Symera operates under voluntary participation by resource owners. It is the computer owners, not the system, who define the conditions under which the computer's cycles are allocated. When the owner of a resource employed by the Symera system resumes using her computer, Symera suspends its work on that machine using checkpointing to indicate the status of computations when execution was discontinued. Then it moves the job back to its resource manager to await the next available resource.