A Service for Parallel Processing of Protected Information Queries in a Multi-Server Environment

Abstract

The principles of organizing an Internet service designed to implement parallel processing of protected queries in distributed information systems that are oriented to work in complex network environments with many processing servers are considered. Distinctive feature of the service consists in a possibility to combine sequential ("pipelined") and parallel query processing in a multi-server environment. The service architecture is based on the concept of a "Protected message" corresponding to a container for electronic documents (information query or response) that can be provided with one or more electronic digital signatures. In contrast, for example, to the Web services technology, the described service is based not on the model of calling methods of remote objects, but on the message exchange model. In this case, this means that all service processing functions (methods) have the same strict specification: they receive an array of objects of the "Protected message" program class as a parameter and return an array of objects of the same class. In sequential processing, both arrays usually contain one "Protected message" object each. However, when using parallel processing, arrays can contain multiple elements that correspond to the results of processing by multiple software threads. These processing functions are grouped into one or more dynamic libraries, which are connected to the PMS server when it starts working (each library can be considered as a remote analogue of a Web service), and become available to clients.