best way to enable multiple-receiver queue?

I have a cluster of CPUs generating thumbnails for a render farm. I would like to place thumbnail requests on a queue, and have the cluster of client dequeue the requests and process them.

Of course, each request should be only dequeued once... if a thumbnail is being processed by one CPU, it shouldn't be processed by another CPU.

Can AQS do this? Is it possible have the clients coordinate so that each message is dequeueed by only one client?

If not, will several processes doing a SELECT FOR UPDATE followed by a DELETE be a reasonable approach for multiple consumers to exclusively process requests?

TIA,
Mark

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Mark Harrison
Pixar Animation Studios