Using the Bonita primitives: A case study

The co-ordination language Linda has been used for parallel processing for many years. Linda uses a shared tuple space and a number of primitives to provide access to the tuple space and thereby enabling communication between processes executing concurrently. Linda provides asynchronous communication between processes, but synchronous access between the processes and the tuple spaces. The Bonita primitives are a di erent set of primitives that provide asynchronous access to the tuple spaces. The Bonita primitives can emulate the primary Linda primitives and therefore provides both asynchronous access and synchronous access to tuple spaces. It has been previously claimed[15] that asynchronous tuple space access primitives are required to provide new co-ordination constructs and to improve performance for geographically distributed processes which are required to co-ordinate distribute processes (or agents). In this paper a talk program is used as an example to demonstrate that the concept of tuple spaces are well suited for process co-ordination for distributed processes (or agents), and to provide a comparison between the use of Linda primitives and the Bonita primitives. It is shown that asynchronous tuple space access is essential for such process co-ordination.