Coalescing Idle Workstations as a Multiprocessor System using JavaSpaces and Java Web Start

Many of an organisation's workstations spend the majority of their time either unused or relatively idle. If the wasted processing capacity of these workstations could be aggregated, it could be used to provide processing for computationally intensive applications. This thesis presents the design, development and evaluation of a system which aims to meet this goal. There are two main parts to the system: a distributed environment to which users can submit jobs for execution, and a development framework which can be used to build distributed applications suitable for deployment on the system. The system is evaluated using two sample applications: the n-Queens problem, and a parallel sorting (shearsort) application.