QADPZ - General requirements

The system should provide the following features:

(see also the TERMINOLOGY and DESIGN)

• slave computers of different hardware and software platforms
• slave computers join/leave at any time, accounting done at master
• multiple users at the same time
• multiple jobs per user at the same time
• multiple instances of the same job type
• task-specific binary code, data, and hardware/software requirements
• possibility to receive slave data directly from client (without passing them through master)
• buffering of job tasks and task data at master
• slaves run as daemons/NT service so that the user applications can run without some user to login to the computer
• handling of logging on and off of regular computer users; runs only when nobody logged in (to avoid any disturbance of IDI computer users)
• no component vulnerable to immediate shutdown of any other component
• waste of computational resources minimalized
• possibility to reserve a group of slave computers that will be allocated either at the same time or one by one
• automatic shutdown of the slaves in a group in case of interrupt of one of the group members with the possibility of client receiving the data of the living members of the group that was damaged [to avoid wasting the resources]
• communication between clients, master, and slaves in human-readable easy to debug and easy to extend XML-type language
• slave user programs distributed as libraries (Win32 DLLs, UNIX libraries)
• prone to bugs in the slave programs and external hacker attacks