[NTLUG:Discuss] Distributed processing

[Ian Pilcher]

Greg Edwards wrote:

> 
> The web server (apache) would accept a page request and pass it into the
> system request monitor (I'm calling it an application farm for not
> having a better term that comes to mind).  The web server will do
> nothing more than accept requests and serve pages.  The CGI (PHP, Java,
> Python, or other scripting lang) would do nothing more than accept the
> post, collect the input, pass the request on, once the system returns
> the results request that the page be generated and pass the (now static)
> page back to the user.  The page may be generated on the web server or
> transferred back from the application farm (maybe a page generation
> server).
> 
> Nothing special so far.
> 
> Once inside the farm the system request monitor would determine which
> application is involved and pass the data along.  The application would
> begin processing the data.  The applications would work on parts of the
> data, some concurrently, some parallel, and some monolithic.  Rather
> than a set of functions and procedures being part of a single
> application they would be independent processes using IPCs (message
> queues, shared memory, network transfers) to pass data and return
> results.
> 
> Each host would be assigned a set of functions that it would support and
> not a set of applications.  This does not fit the load balance or
> clustering model very well.  Some hosts could act as database servers,
> some in a Beowulf cluster, some as game tree processors, some as search
> engines (these are just examples).  Not every host would support every
> request that could be generated.  This makes for a poor fit for a strict
> message queue solution as you don't want to send the queue to hosts that
> are non players in the logic thread.


Sounds like a distributed object transaction monitor to me.  I believe
that BEA WebLogic and IBM WebShere Application Server have already
been mentioned in this thread.


> Now the kicker:)  I'm building this on sweat equity!!  High cost
> solutions are not in the picture cause I simply don't have the cash. 
> What I do have is the knowledge to build it, but that takes lots of
> time.  It'd be nice if I can find it in the free software world but I
> haven't yet.  Even if I needed to fork over a couple hundred I'd
> consider that.

Umm, you're nuts.  Software like this is incredibly complex, and the
price tag is set accordingly.  AFAIK, no free software project has even
attempted something like this.

-- 
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Ian Pilcher                                         ian.pilcher at home.com
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