Patent ID: 7987146

Claim:
A method for provisioning software on a plurality of computational nodes in a distributed computing environment, the method on an information processing system comprising: accepting a plurality of support processing requirements associated with a software product each of the support processing requirements specifying a support component required by the software product; expanding the plurality of requirements into multiple sets of installation requirements; minimizing at least one set of installation requirements in the multiple sets of installation requirements to produce at least one minimized set of installation requirements; determining whether any pair of requirements in the minimized set of installation requirements includes a pair of conflicting requirements; determining, in response to at least one pair of requirements in the minimized set of installation requirements conflicting, whether the software product allows each requirement in the at least one pair of conflicting requirements to be located on separate nodes; and determining at least one multi-node installation topology for the software product in response to determining that the software product allows each requirement in the at least one pair of conflicting requirements to be installed on separate nodes, wherein the at least one multi-node installation topology includes a plurality of installation requirement sets for each node in the multi-node installation topology.