The FTA design paradigm for distributed systems

Abstract The Flip-Tick Architecture, or FTA for short, is a collection of organizing principles and generic functional units for building distributed systems which are based on cooperative and competitive teams of small or medium-grained agents called actors . We describe the design and operation principles of the architecture and present some ideas of how to build applications with an FTA structure. A typical application system comprises tens or hundreds of actors sharing one or several common data storages known as tagboards . There is no explicit point-to-point communication between actors. Instead, actors communicate by reading and posting tags with data on the tagboards using various mechanisms for synchronization. The distribution across several interconnected computers as well as the choice of actor granularity and synchronism are up to the application designers.

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