[nickpsecurity]

I agree on great perspective. I'll further it by saying there's a ton of uses for batch and even for utilization. Any job that is a time-consuming hand-off from user or developers might be most effective in a batch run. The reason is that, esp w/ I/O processors, the system keeps running without swapping CPU state, cache, or memory pages. Highly efficient for given task even without a time requirement.

Personally, I think the better and modern take on it is a compute cluster where certain nodes can be brought up for dedicated, batch runs while others run interactive functionality. The embedded safety and security scene have been trying to do it with the partitioning, MILS kernels that strictly separate and schedule workloads based on priority w/ fault-isolation. Recent ones allow resource donation by partitions that are done so waste is minimal. Finally, there's security benefits in that batch runs make it easy to eliminate covert storage and timing channels. Hell, you can even do what I did (and cloud is just now doing) in designing a custom OS image per batch app to load for that on a minimal kernel. Reduces resource requirements and problems.