An asynchronous distributed systems platform for heterogeneous environments

Abstract

Since its introduction over a decade ago the tuple space paradigm has attracted interest from the distributed systems community. Despite being developed for shared memory parallel architectures, the simplicity and elegance of the model has led researchers to attempt to realise it in loosely coupled distributed environments. This paper argues that these attempts have largely failed due to their selection of inappropriate target domains, lack of multicast support and failure to operate in heterogeneous environments. We present the design and implementation of a new tuple space platform engineered using IP multicast. The platform is designed to support complex distributed applications such as groupware and mobile applications, operates over a range of end-systems and networks and offers performance comparable to existing RPC based platforms even in tests designed to benefit the RPC paradigm.