CTLSMB 1.2


                                 Gregg Wonderly
                             Mathematics Department
                            Oklahoma State University

                                   8-Dec-1987

        1  Introduction

        CTLSMB  was  developed  by  Gregg  Wonderly  of  the  Mathematics
        Department  at  Oklahoma  State  University.   CTLSMB is a server
        symbiont whose intended use is to allow the VMS queuing mechanism
        to be used to execute programs on behalf of other users.  The big
        difference between using CTLSMB and normal batch jobs is that the
        processes  created  by CTLSMB are cached, and therefore reusable.
        This makes it possible to  use  very  periodic  batch  jobs  with
        smaller overhead due to the elimination of process creation.

        CTLSMB was originally written to be used in  the  VMS  PMDF  mail
        project.  Its purpose then (and now) was to alleviate the problem
        of process creation overhead due to  mass  batch  job  submission
        (for  each  mail  message  comming  into a system, PMDF creates a
        batch job to deliver that mail message to its  next  destination.
        During peak times, an extremely large number of batch jobs can be
        started.  The first few will end up delivering the mail, but  all
        jobs must run to completion).

        It was soon discovered that CTLSMB had much  wider  applications,
        because  of  it's  interface  to the VMS queuing system.  Besides
        PMDF, CTLSMB is currently being used to  serve  a  generic  queue
        that provides RJE access to an IBM mainframe.  The user can issue
        the command "submit/queue=ibm$batch" to submit the batch job, and
        the  command file used to process tasks for that queue takes care
        of  packaging  the  file  so  that  it  can  be  processed.   The
        possiblities are endless.