Farm Batch System and Fermi Inter-Process Communication and synchronization toolkit

Farms Batch System (FBS) was developed as a batch process management system for off-line Run II data processing at Fermilab. FBS will manage PC farms composed of up to 250 nodes and scalable to 1000 nodes with disk capacity o f up to several TB. FBS allows users to start arrays of parallel processes on multiple computers. It uses a simplified "resource counting" method load balancing. FBS has been successfully used for more than a year at Fermilab by fixed target experiments and will be used for collider experiment off-l ine data processing. Fermi Inter-Process Communication toolkit (FIPC) was designed as a suppleme nt product for FBS that helps establish synchronization and communication b etween processes running in a distributed batch environment. However, FIPC is an independent package, and can be used with other batch systems, as wel l as in a non-batch environment. FIPC provides users with a variety of glob al distributed objects such as semaphores, queues and string variables. Oth er types of objects can be easily added to FIPC. FIPC has been running on several PC farms at Fermilab for half a year and i s going to be used by CDF for off-line data processing. (C) 2001 Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.