BONITA: a set of tuple space primitives for distributed coordination

Abstract

In the last few years the use of distributed structured shared memory paradigms for coordination between parallel processes has become common. One of the most well known implementations of this paradigm is the shared tuple space model (as used in Linda). We describe a new set of primitives for fully distributed coordination of processes and agents using tuple spaces, called the BONITA primitives. The Linda primitives provide synchronous access to tuple spaces, whereas the BONITA primitives provide asynchronous access to tuple spaces. The proposed primitives are able to mimic the Linda primitives, therefore providing the ease of use and expressibility of Linda together with a number of advantages for the coordination of agents or processes in distributed environments. The primitives allow user processes to perform computation concurrently with tuple space accesses, and provide new coordination constructs which lead to more efficient programs. We present the (informal) semantics of the BONITA primitives, a description of how the Linda primitives can be modelled using them and a demonstration of the advantages of the BONITA primitives over the Linda primitives.