/ 
Swarmage-0.01000_01
/ Swarmage

NAME

Swarmage - A Distributed Job Queue

SYNOPSIS

use Swarmage;

DESCRIPTION

This is a rewrite of previous Swarmage releases. So we're back to pre-alpha.

Swarmage brings you a complete Controlled Job Queue environment for high performance, distributed tasks. Swarmage uses POE's asynchronous engine to make a non-blocking worker possible.

TERMS

Cell

A Swarmage Cell consists of one or more Drones which are attatched to a Queue.

Drone

A Swarmage Drone is the master process that controls multiple Workers. The Workers may consist of completely independent tasks

Worker

A Swarmage Worker is a process that is spawned by the Drone.

SWARMAGE CELL

A Swarmage Cell is the smallest unit of operation in Swarmage, and it looks something like this:

----------------
| Global Queue |
----------------
   ^ |
   | v
---------
| Drone |--------------------
---------                   |
    |                       v
    |  ----------     ---------------
    |--| Worker |-----| Local Queue |
    |  ----------  |  ---------------
    |  ----------  |
    |--| Worker |--|
    |  ----------  |
    |  ----------  |
    |--| Worker |--|
    |  ----------  |
    .              .
    .              .
    .              .

There is a Global Queue, which Drones attatch to. This is where users typically queue their tasks. Drones take tasks that their Workers can handle. This is done by specifying which Workers can handle which types of tasks in the initialization of Drones.

Once the Drone receives possibly multiple tasks from the Global Queue, the tasks are inserted into what's called a Local Queue. Drones keep track of what tasks are currently handle by looking at this Local Queue, and in turn Workers attempt to grab tasks the Local Queue.

Workers only knows about the Local Queue. This is to avoid unnecessary polling by the Workers to the Global Queue. Workers can also pass tasks between other Workers in the local Drone group by enqueuing new tasks to the Local Queue.

Once the task is completed, the Drone is notified, and the task will be finalized.

Please consult the documentation for Swarmage::Drone and Swarmage::Worker for more details on how the components interact with each other

AUTHOR

Copyright (c) 2007 Daisuke Maki <daisuke@endeworks.jp>

LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html