Some low-level issues in the implementation of a shared blackboard

Recently, several Linda-like parallel extensions of programming languages have been developed. A Linda-based extension consists roughly of a number of sequential agents (processes) communicating with each other by means of a shared associative tuple space or blackboard. The Linda communication paradigm is deemed useful and powerful. The main difficulty in implementing this type of communication is the design of an efficient architecture for the shared blackboard. The challenge is to design a blackboard that can be accessed simultaneously by as many agents as possible, thereby preserving its integrity and correct behavior. This paper describes the architecture of a scalable and efficient implementation of a blackboard for Multi-Prolog, a blackboard-based parallel Prolog