<urc>
<url>http://www.liv.ac.uk/HPC/farHomepage.html
<title>Far
<title_line>for exploitation of spare processing capacity in networks of Unix workstations
<abstract>
    far is a software tool for supporting the exploitation of spare
    processing capacity in networks of Unix workstations.

    It is underpinned by a managed database of workstation activity
    from which the state of the network can be assessed and spare
    resources identified.

    The software supports:-

       - remote login to arbitrary lightly-loaded remote workstation
       - running commands on arbitrary lightly-loaded remote workstation
       - finding where specific users are logged in
       - identification of clusters of lightly-loaded remote workstations
         (e.g. for use with any message passing subsystem such as PVM or MPI)
       - reserving of dedicated clusters out of the general pool 
         (e.g. for use with any message passing subsystem such as PVM or MPI)

The software has been used to support the running of HPF-generated and other
message-passing parallel programs in a network of about 200 publicly-accessible
Sun workstations. It can be adapted to run on networks of SGI, and HP 
workstations.
<environment>
Full source code is available for SunOS4, IRIX 5, HP-UX and Solaris 2
operating systems. 
<contact>j.s.morgan@liv.ac.uk
<keywords>workstation cluster; load balancing
<category>dpt
</urc>