US Patent 7546366 Data collection in a computer cluster

A mechanism for transferring state information in a computer cluster having a plurality of computer nodes is disclosed. In the method, heartbeat messages are sent periodically from a first computer node of the computer cluster to other computer nodes of the cluster. Each of the other nodes includes at least one resource for performing at least one cluster-specific task. In order that up-to-date state information may be collected even in large clusters about the ability of the resources to perform the cluster-specific tasks, without excessively loading the computer nodes and the network, current state information is returned in a heartbeat acknowledgment message to the node that sent the heartbeat message.