Canada’s Freedman Sharp & Associates Inc has released its Load Balancer v3.1, an automatic job queueing and load distribution program for the network. It is said to use centrally maintained configuration information along with dynamically gathered performance information to choose the best suited computer for each application. Users can submit and manipulate their jobs from any machine on the net. The Calgary, Alberta company says the Load Balancer handles licensing, security, multi-system speed/memory/swap differences, priority for interactive users, time-of-day limits on workstation usage and per-user permissions for each machine and application. It includes a network-wide batch queueing system with 256 priority levels. Tests in a five-node seismic processing environment are said to have shown a reduction in the run-time of a series of jobs to 43 minutes from 150 minutes. It will be available for Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co, Digital Equipment Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc machines come April priced in the US at $1,500.
