Published: February 17, 2014

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The wait is over! This week, we’re pleased to announce the preview release of Distributed Computing Cluster (known as Distributed Processing in its beta release last year) as the newest edition to the Laserfiche product suite. Distributed Computing Cluster allows you to distribute the processing work for Laserfiche applications like Workflow and Web Access onto one or more machines dedicated to performing that work. As a result, Laserfiche applications are able to add features that require significant resources without increased load on the server. The Distributed Computing Cluster 9.1 preview release adds OCR-related features to Workflow and Web Access.

How does it work?

A Distributed Computing Cluster installation consists of one or more machines where the Distributed Computing Cluster Service is installed.

In multi-machine clusters, the service is installed with one of two roles.

• On one machine, the service is installed as a scheduler. The Distributed Computing Cluster Scheduler receives jobs from Laserfiche applications, break the jobs into tasks, and send those tasks to worker machines. By default, the scheduler does not perform tasks.
• On other machines in the cluster, the service is installed as a worker. Distributed Computing Cluster Workers receive and perform tasks from the scheduler and send the finished work back to the Laserfiche application.

When a Laserfiche application sends a job to the cluster, the scheduler breaks the job into tasks and sends those tasks to the Distributed Computing Cluster Workers. These worker machines perform the tasks and the finished work is sent back to the Laserfiche application.

In single-machine clusters, the service is installed as a scheduler and is given permission to perform tasks from the Web Administration Console.

Want to learn more? Read the Getting Started with Laserfiche Distributed Computing Cluster 9.1 Preview white paper or the online help.