1.1. Overview of MedeA Installation

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The three-tiered architecture of MedeA consists of the MedeA graphical environment (GUI, main tier), the JobServer (middle tier), and the TaskServer (end tier).

The middle tier or the JobServer is the central hub for controlling computational jobs, job pre-processing, and job post-processing. The JobServer maintains a database of job-related data and stores computational results on disk. A MedeA Job is a workflow or protocol generated by a MedeA compute engine GUI or by the MedeA flowchart editor. A typical Job may generate one or multiple tasks using MedeA compute engines.

The end tier or the TaskServer submits individual tasks, parts of a MedeA Job, to the internal queuing system of MedeA or to an external queuing systems such as LSF, PBS, or similar schedulers. One or several TaskServers can be configured and connected to a JobServer. All communication between a TaskServer and the GUI flows through the JobServer.

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The three tiers can be installed on the same or different machines; there is no conceptual difference between running the GUI, JobServer, and TaskServer on one laptop or using separate machines.

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A single installation ISO image allows installing the MedeA GUI, JobServer, and TaskServer (including the MedeA compute engines VASP, LAMMPS, GIBBS, Gaussian, and MOPAC) on either Windows or Linux operating systems. MedeA uses an integrated version of SQLite to manage experimental databases, code specific data, and data generated by the user.

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