BONITA: a set of tuple space primitives for distributed coordination

Abstract
In the last few years the use of distributed structuredshared memory paradigms for coordination betweenparallel processes has become common. One of themost well known implementations of this paradigm isthe shared tuple space model (as used in Linda). Inthis paper we describe a new set of primitives for fullydistributed coordination of processes and agents usingtuple spaces, called the Bonita primitives. The Lindaprimitives provide synchronous access to tuple spaces,whereas the Bonita primitives provide asynchronousaccess to tuple spaces. The proposed primitives areable to mimic the Linda primitives, therefore providingthe ease of use and expressibility of Linda together witha number of advantages for the coordination of agentsor 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 efficientprograms.In this paper we present the (informal) semantics ofthe Bonita primitives, a description of how the Lindaprimitives can be modelled using them and a demonstration of the advantages of the Bonita primitives over the Linda primitives.

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