This course is run at the The University of Nottingham within the School of Computer Science & IT. The course is run by Graham Kendall (EMAIL : gxk@cs.nott.ac.uk)
The scheduling algorithms we have considered make no guarantees about the jobs
that are run. In some circumstances we might need to make certain promises (and
live up to them).
In this day and age it is common to have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your customers. Part of the SLA may specify that the average response time has to be (say) two seconds. This means that the process, when it arrives in the ready queue must be serviced in (say) 0.5 of a second. (The two second response time is from the user pressing the return key/mouse button and the information being displayed on the screen - therefore, other factors, such as the network, have to be taken into account).
In order to meet these times the support teams will manipulate the various scheduling algorithm parameters to ensure they meet the SLA. If the average response time starts to get near the time specified in the SLA then they will recommend various courses of actions, in the worst case it will mean upgrading the computer.
Another form of guaranteed scheduling is described in (Tanenbaum, 1992).
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Last Updated : 23/01/2002