A Tuple Space Service for Large Scale Infrastructures

Coordinating tasks is one of the main activities of every grid middleware. There are several ways to achieve this goal, for example using publish/subscribe systems or workflow engines. In this article we will analyse another possible model: tuple spaces. The tuple space model has been successfully used for years for coordinating tasks in computational applications and has interesting characteristics like the support to open systems, allowing an application to scale without the need to reimplement it. This article will describe our experience in developing a tuple space system for the Globus Toolkit using Web services.