User:Cooper.thompson/Appistry

Appistry
Appistry is a St. Louis-based company that offers their flagship product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF), as a platform for distributed computing (or cloud computing).

Enterprise Application Fabric
Appistry EAF is a platform for distributing compute tasks across multiple computers. EAF operates like a client-server model, however with the important caveat that the "server" is actually an aggregation of multiple computers. Appistry refers to this aggregation as a "fabric."

Appistry EAF is available for Windows and Linux platforms. Each fabric can include either Windows or Linux computers, but not both.

Capability
When a client sends a request to an Appistry fabric, the fabric workers decides amongst themselves which server will actually service the request. In a fabric, each server is equally capable of servicing a request, however some servers can be more desirable for particular requests, either because they have a superior hardware profile, or because of a feature called "affinity."

Affinity
Affinity can be used to direct requests to servers that are especially desirable due to local data, or because required software is only installed on a subset of the workers in the fabric.

FAM
The Fabric Accessible Memory is a NUMA.. something.

Limitations
Appistry versions before v4.0 used multicast as a communication mechanism between workers in a fabric, effectively limiting the scope of a "fabric" to single network, since many organizations aren't willing to route multicast traffic.