ICL Plc has stripped the resource and task scheduling software it developed for use on its VME mainframes and applied it to UnixWare, claiming that no other company offers the same fine- grain resource allocation capabilities. Unix schedulers typically attempt to allocate resources in a fair manner. ICL says its scheduler isn’t fair and allocates resources by business need. The Policy Scheduler enables users to set policies for groups of work and that resources such as memory can be dynamically allocated according to behaviour. For example, memory dedicated to an application that isn’t used frequently can be re-allocated elsewhere. Resources for batch and online tranaction processing activity can be allocated as required. As well as implementing the scheduler on its UnixWare systems, ICL is also negotiating a license agreement with UnixWare owner Santa Cruz Operation Inc that will likely see it bundled with future versions of the Unix operating system. ICL would like to implement the work on Windows NT too, but NT doesn’t not have the kinds of enterprise system hooks required to make the software work.
Content from our partners
