Patent ID: 8264726

Claim:
A method of operating a printing system for parallel processing a print job with a plurality of processing nodes into a printer ready format for printing the print job, said processing nodes communicating with a virtual disk remote transfer system, comprising: splitting the print job into a plurality of job chunks, wherein each of the plurality of chunks range in size from at least one page to the entire size of the print job, wherein pages comprising the chunks are selected in accordance with predetermined selection factors for optimizing page printing processing efficiency; selectively storing the job chunks and print-ready pages in the virtual disk remote transfer system, wherein the virtual disk remote transfer system comprises an intermediary storage for data transfer to selected processing nodes including a RAM and a physical disk, and a transparent networked file system interface, and wherein the virtual disk remote transfer system is implemented by providing a shared memory interface; assigning each of the plurality of job chunks to selected processing nodes for parallel processing the job chunks into the printer-ready format; monitoring available space in the virtual disk remote transfer system including detecting a data overflow in the RAM and storing new data in the physical disk until data storage in the RAM is available; selectively blocking reads of the job chunks and print ready data stored in the virtual disk remote transfer system until receipt of an end of file signal; and printing the print job.