The Tromsų And Cornell Moving Agents (TACOMA)
project focuses on operating system support for agents; and how
agents can be used to solve problems traditionally addressed by other
distributed computing paradigms, e.g. the client/server model. We have
completed a series of TACOMA distributed systems where agents can be moved
about in the Internet.
An agent in TACOMA is a piece of code that can be installed and executed on
a remote computer. Such an agent may explicitly migrate to other hosts in
the network during execution. We are currently focusing on fault-tolerance,
security, applicability and management issues. The TACOMA platform has also
been ported to new operating system architectures, in particular Windows
NT, Windows CE and the PalmOS.
Several TACOMA applications are under construction. One example is a
wide-area network weather monitoring system accessible over the Internet.
This distributed application is StormCast. We are also investigating
whether agents can be useful in extensible file system architectures.
Collaborators
University of Tromsų, Norway
Cornell University, University of California San Diego, USA
Contact
Dag Johansen
Faculty of Science, University of Tromsų
dag@cs.uit.no
http://www.tacoma.cs.uit.no/