Distributed administration of a lock for an operational group of compute nodes in a hierarchical tree structured network including assigning the root node of the operational group to send acknowledgments for lock requests, the root lock administration module comprising a module of automated computing machinery; receiving a lock request assigned to a particular node from a child node; determining whether another request from another child is directly ahead in an acknowledgement queue; if a request from another child is directly ahead in the acknowledgement queue, putting the lock request for the particular node in the acknowledgement queue until the lock request directly ahead in the acknowledgement queue is satisfied and when the lock request ahead in the queue is satisfied, sending the particular node for whom the lock request is assigned a message acknowledging the particular node has the lock; and if a request from another child is not directly ahead in a queue, sending to the particular node for whom the lock request is assigned a message acknowledging that the particular node has the lock.