A-tasks

When ADAM is used for data reduction, ICL is used to communicate with one or more A-tasks or application tasks which contain the data reduction programs. Each of these tasks can be associated with an ICL command by means of the DEFINE command. When the associated ICL command is issued the A-task will be loaded and executed. If the same ICL command is issued a second time the task will not normally need to be reloaded so that execution will be faster. However, if too many tasks are loaded one of these tasks may have to be killed before another can be loaded. The maximum number of tasks allowed to be loaded at one time has a default value of three, but may be adjusted, on a system basis, by the system logical name ADAM_CACHLIMIT. The least recently used task is always selected for killing when the limit is exceeded. This process is known as task caching and such tasks are referred to as cached tasks.