Jobs And Process

JOBS AND PROCESSORS
For the purpose of describing and characterizing different types of real-time systems and methods for scheduling and resource management, it is more convenient for us to speak of all kinds of work done by computing and communication systems in general terms. We call each unit of work that is scheduled and executed by the system a job and a set of related jobs which jointly provide some system function a task. Hence, the computation of a control law is a job. So is the computation of a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) of sensor data, or the transmission of a data packet, or the retrieval of a file, and so on. We call them a control-law computation, a FFT computation, a packet transmission, and so on, only when we want to be specific about the kinds of work, that is, the types of jobs.

Similarly, rather than using different verbs (e.g., compute and transmit) for different types of jobs, we say that a job executes or is executed by the (operating) system. Every job executes on some resource. For example, the jobs mentioned above execute on a CPU, a network, and a disk, respectively. These resources are called servers in queuing theory literature and, sometimes, active resources in real-time systems literature. In later chapters, we will use the term server extensively to mean something else. To avoid overloading this term, we call all these resources processors except occasionally when we want to be specific about what they are.