Sesssion Coordinator

The Amaranth Session Coordinator is the underlying software engine responsible for creating, admitting, monitoring, altering and terminating sessions. A session is defined as a user running an application over the network. The Coordinator is also known as the SescoServer. There will be only a single instance of this process running on each machine in an Amaranth-based Network.

Sesco is composed of the GUI front end that will be used by both ordinary users and System Administrators. The former individuals will use Sesco to make Application Requests that are either granted and become sessions, or denied for any number of reasons. Administrators are responsible for managing Sesco itself and the underlying data files which together compose Sesco's vision of its world, from users and groups, applications and their variants and of course knowledge of all the hardware, network cards and nodes.

A typical example of how Sesco would function is as follows: A user logs into the SescoClient using the ARQ tool. He/she then chooses what application they wish to run, change the QoS set points as desired then submit the request to the SescoServer. The server then examines everything from the possible paths from source computer to the destination, the load on the network and all resource based constraints. If the session is admittable then the proper data structures are added to the Server instance and the GUI reports success. Now the user just runs their application. If not admittable a message informs the user and they can attempt again later, or even immediately because resources may have been freed up enough to now admit the session.

For a much more detailed explanation of how Sesco works, or how it represents users and applications you can download the Sesco documentation from this page. These documents contain screen shots, some tutorials and other details such as the Q-Language and internal data structures. There are seven documents in Microsoft Word 95 format and they are zipped with WinZip 7.0. Please note that these are first draft documents still subject to revision.

Sesco Documentation download


Jeffery Hansen
Last modified: Tue Aug 8 15:49:26 EDT 2000