Overview Download: version 0.80   (released 2003/02/20)   Version History

The Tonic package was originally developed as a joint project between Boston University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics, to investigate the extent to which Java-based tuplespaces facilitate distributed scientific computation in heterogeneous networks of machines ranging from commodity PCs to exotic supercomputers. To focus our effort we first developed a suite of benchmarks, which may be used to quickly assess the performance of JavaSpaces or TSpaces on a given network, or as a framework for further development.

Several offshoots of the original work have since emerged: one involves the rapid development of a data modeling testbed, as part of the NSF ITR grant #0121296 for developing Virtual Observatory infrastructure; a second employs tuplespaces at the MIT Center for Space Research, as a blindingly simple way of adding fault tolerance and load-balancing to distributed ISIS computations. Tonic has also been used or cited, both nationally and internationally, in a number of other contexts.

A guiding principle of the work is minimal buy-in. This point is elaborated in the papers below, but in short means we seek to demonstrate that computational power beyond the scope of the desktop can be made available to larger numbers of typical practicing scientists, without a great deal of fuss on their part or buckets of drudgery for their technical support staff.

The package currently contains several score Java and C benchmarks, utility classes, and scripts. Among these are low-level tuple I/O benchmarks, higher-level parallel algorithms, a dynamic compilation technique, and a node configuration mechanism which avoids the need to install JavaSpaces on remote machines.

Since configuring, launching, and terminating Jini/JavaSpaces sessions can be a daunting task, Tonic also provides a GNU configure mechanism and helper scripts which simplify that process considerably. You might find these utilities useful even if you have no interest whatsoever in Java tuplespace benchmarks or scientific computing.