Space-based architecture

A space-based architecture (SBA) is an approach to distributed computing systems where the various components interact with each other by exchanging tuples or entries via one or more shared spaces.

A key goal of both approaches is to create loosely-coupled systems that minimize configuration, especially shared knowledge of who does what, leading to the objectives of better availability, resilience, scalability, etc.

More specifically, an SBA is a distributed-computing architecture for achieving linear scalability of stateful, high-performance applications using the tuple space paradigm.

With a space-based architecture, applications are built out of a set of self-sufficient units, known as processing-units (PU).

The SBA model is closely related to other patterns that have been proved successful in addressing the application scalability challenge, such as shared nothing architecture (SN), used by Google, Amazon.com and other well-known companies.