Apple Qmaster 3 User Manual
Page 10
Computers that submit batches to the Apple Qmaster distributed processing system are
called clients. A job is a processing task such as a Compressor preset-source pair, or a
Shake file, or other files or commands that use UNIX commands to specify settings such
as rendering instructions and file locations and destinations.
Batch of
processing jobs
Client computer
Jobs are submitted.
Destination folder
Files are placed at
specified destination.
Processed
files
Apple Qmaster cluster
Processing is
performed by cluster.
Network
A batch is one or more jobs submitted for processing at one time. The procedure is
analogous to printing multipage documents from a word processing program; the files
are spooled and processed in the background. Although a batch can include just one
job, you will typically want to submit several jobs at once for processing. Similarly, several
people can use the same Apple Qmaster system at the same time, with several client
computers sending batches in the same time frame. Batches are managed and distributed
by the computer that is designated as the Apple Qmaster cluster controller, which is
described in the next section.
Basic Components of the Apple Qmaster Distributed Processing
System
Although the Apple Qmaster software includes a few different applications (see
), as a whole it is part of a networked system that includes the following basic
components.
• Client(s): The computer or computers that use Compressor or Apple Qmaster to submit
jobs for distributed processing. Applications that can use Apple Qmaster services for
processing include Compressor, Shake, Autodesk Maya, and many UNIX command-line
programs.
• An Apple Qmaster cluster: An Apple Qmaster cluster contains:
• Service nodes: The computers that perform the processing of batches submitted via
Compressor or Apple Qmaster. A batch can include one or more jobs.
10
Chapter 1
Distributed Processing Basics