Providing QoS (Quality of Service) in batch resources against the uncertainty of resource availability due to the space-sharing nature of scheduling policies is a critical capability required for high-performance computing. This paper introduces a technique called personal cluster which reserves a partition of batch resources on user’s demand in a best-effort manner. A personal cluster provides a private cluster dedicated to the user during a user-specified time period by installing a user-level resource manager on the resource partition. This technique not only enables cost-effective resource utilization and efficient task management but also provides the user a uniform interface to heterogeneous resources regardless of local resource management software. A prototype implementation using a PBS batch resource manager and Globus Toolkits based on Web Services shows that the overhead of instantiating a personal cluster of medium size is small, which is just about 1 minute for a personal cluster having 32 processors.