Initiator and Helper Agents An IncrediBuild Agent should be installed on each machine that you'd like to be part of the IncrediBuild pool. Essentially, any Agent can act either as an Initiator (when it initiates executions via IncrediBuild) or as a Helper (when it contributes its idle CPU's to processes distributed by IncrediBuild across the network). In order for an Agent to be able to act as an Initiator, an IncrediBuild solution should be assigned to the Agent. For more information on the various IncrediBuild solutions, check out the IncrediBuild solutions page. Initiator Agents – Once assigned with a proper solution an Agent can initiate executions with IncrediBuild. Tasks spawned as part of these execution may be distributed by IncrediBuild across the various idle CPU's on Agents available as part of the IncrediBuild pool, resulting in much faster execution. Every Initiator Agent can also function as a Helper Agent. Helper Agents – The installed IncrediBuild Agents act as Helper Agents on all computers that are designated to participate in the IncrediBuild network, inclusive of any remote or cloud-based machines. These machines will be able to execute distributed tasks. On machines acting as Helpers, you don't need to have anything besides an IncrediBuild Agent. For example, if you are distributing Visual Studio compilations using IncrediBuild to Helper A, this Helper doesn't need to have Visual Studio installed on it, neither the compiler or other build tools nor the source code you are compiling, only an IncrediBuild Agent should be installed on this host machine. Also, once a compilation is being distributed to be processed on Helper A will conclude, IncrediBuild will transparently make sure that everything that was generated by this distributed compilation process will be synced back to the Initiator machine (such as object files, pdb files, etc). | 