A farm based on LAVC for DELPHI production: Performance and technical solutions for an efficient and reliable use and management

Examining lousely coupled parallel solutions as computing resource we found Local Area VAXcluster suitable for building a production Farm. We transformed, tuning LAVc parameters, a general purpose computing environment in a specialized one, optimized for the production needs. To face the higher complexity introduced by the subdivision of the production between several computers, we developed a central software structure that surveys the functioning of the farm, informs and interfaces the users, automatically closes productions, saves bookeeping information and reports errors. For this we needed an efficient process-to-process communication mechanism, that we found to be an innovative use of some Lock Management system features