From blog.elcomsoft.com
Concurrent multitasking
In large organizations, there are often cases where various tasks need to be solved concurrently, and password recovery is no exception. At certain times, there may be multiple tasks with equal priority.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery in its classic shape has queues that are engineered to solve password recovery jobs consecutively and not in parallel, regardless of how much or how little computational resources are available. The tool includes numerous “agents,” which are powerful workstations with the EDPR agent apps installed on them, and a single server that controls and coordinates password recovery jobs by allocating all available computational resources to a single job on the top of the queue. The server in turn is managed through a GUI (we call it “console”), which is the user interface to interact with.
Users can run the console app on more than one computer, but a single EDPR license limits each console to a single server. If more than one license is available (thus several servers are available on the network), then each console can switch between those servers. Each server maintains its own job queue, and connects to its own, dedicated pool of agents, while each agent can only connect to a certain server (and cannot talk to other servers on the same network).