Dogma: An Open Source Tool For Utilization Of Idle Cycles On Lab Computers

Organizations often have many computers that are unused for much of the day. The desire to utilize these idle machines has spawned systems that attempt to harness the unused computer cycles for useful work. These include SETI, Globus, Condor, DOGMA, and recently SLURM. In the late 1990’s the Distributed Object Group Management Architecture (DOGMA) project was begun in the Network Computing Lab in the Computer Science department at Brigham Young University. DOGMA is a Java based system that allocates Java programs (jobs) to unused workstations. Although DOGMA currently has over 700 desktop workstations available for use overnight, there were several issues which impeded wide acceptance. These included robustness of the implementation, maintainability, and management issues. Many of these issues have been overcome in the most recent implementation. This paper will discuss DOGMA including its basic design and the current status of the project. We will also discuss alternatives for its future evolution. It is interesting to observe that many of the unresolved issues are of little interest as Computer Science problems but may be of great interest to Information Technology researchers.