[Chicken-users] what would you recommend for this ?

[HP wei]

I am seeking some ideas about the following project.

Suppose there are about 20 machines A1, A2, ... A20.
Each Ai does the following 
   (1) at some specified time,  it checks the status of some databases
        and the status of the disks ....
        If certain condition is met, either an email is sent to someone
        or a message is sent to the master machine (see below).
   (2) At the request of the master machine,
        it carries out the requested task and sends back result.

Let there be one master machine M.
I am thinking that this should run a spiffy web server.
It needs to maintain many states and communicate with
Ai.

Let there be un-specified number of Clients (C1, C2, ...)
connecting to M at un-specified times.
Let's suppose I am C1.
I would like to see the status of those databases and disks.
And if needed, I would like to issue a command to resolve problems.
e.g.  
    (a) sync from M3:database_x  to M10:database_x
    (b) ask all machines to gather all status now.

Of course, the requests (issued commands) from different Ci
need to be consistent and may need to be queued.

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How to proceed ?
For Ci, it can just use the available web browser.

For M, maybe a spiffy web server.
Is it possible to issue a command to many Ci's  asynchronously and
gather results from each Ci ?  (sort of like MapReduce)

What about Ai ?  A rpc-server ?

THanks
HP