Patent ID: 7403975

Claim:
A supply chain management system, comprising: a plurality of computer systems, wherein each computer system comprises: a plurality of computational nodes each capable of executing jobs related to supply chain management and providing a job output, each computational node having no communication link to any other computational node; a database stores planning instructions and planning data for the jobs as executed on the plurality of computational nodes; and a database messaging system including, (a) a controller, (b) a first communication link coupled between the controller and the database, (c) a plurality of second communication links respectively coupled between the controller and each of the plurality of computational nodes for transmitting messages between the controller and each of the plurality of computational nodes, the second communication links each having a communication bandwidth, and (d) a plurality of third communication links respectively coupled between each of the plurality of computations nodes and the database for accessing the planning instructions and planning data from the database to execute the jobs on the plurality of computational nodes and sending the job output to the database, the third communication links each having a communication bandwidth greater than the communication bandwidth of the second communication links; wherein the plurality of computational nodes communicates with the database asynchronously and the jobs execute asynchronously on the plurality of computational nodes according to the planning instructions and planning data received from the database; wherein the controller synchronizes the jobs for execution on the plurality of computational nodes by detecting a job processing request and assigning one of the plurality of computational nodes to execute the job.