Exercises: Tuple Space

Before asking questions regarding this exercise, please review the lecture notes of Week #01 and #02 as well as the documentation on the Erlang web pages.

Tuple Space

In Erlang, implement a simple Tuple Space platform. The functionality to be supported includes:

• TS = new_tuple_space() create a new tuple space
• in(TS, Tuple) add Tuple to the tuple space TS
• Tuple = out(TS, Pattern) find any tuple matching Pattern and return it. The tuple will be removed from the tuple space.

It is up to you what the Tuple argument for in and return value for out looks like, but an Erlang tuple is a good starting point. The Pattern argument for out, should serve as a pattern for matching the tuples in the tuple space. It should at least support wildcards.

Multiple processes should be able to access a single tuple space to exchange messages and coordinate through it. How scalable is your solution?

Develop test programs that use the tuple space. Try to implement some simple examples of networked or distributed systems, for example: a ping-pong client-server application, a simple database server, a parallel matrix multiplication program, a simple chat server. Try to implement different styles of communication, including unicast and multicast.