Scalable Distributed Tuplespaces

Abstract

The purpose of the research has been to develop a multiple tuplespace model that would scale as much as the Internet. A tuplespace is like a shared cache, in which tuples are accessed associatively. One issue in designing a multiple tuplespaces model is keeping track of tuples over multiple space servers. Since, replication is used to reduce access latencies to tuples, another issue is of establishing coherency of replicas and consistency of tuplespace operations over multiple replicas.

The thesis looks at design of a hierarchical directory structure over a flat organization of tuplespaces, which addresses the above issues. With this model scalable protocols are proposed that keep track of tuples/templates among multiple nodes, and establish coherency of tuple replicas.

A prototype of this model has been implemented within the Jini