On the Expressiveness of Coordination Models

A number of different coordination models for specifying inter-process communication and synchronisation rely on a notion of shared dataspace. Many of these models are extensions of the Linda coordination model, which includes operations for adding, deleting and testing the presence/absence of data in a shared dataspace. We compare the expressive power of three classes of coordination models based on shared dataspaces. The first class relies on Linda’s communication primitives, while a second class relies on the more general notion of multi-set rewriting (e.g., like Bauhaus Linda or Gamma). Finally, we consider a third class of models featuring communication transactions that consist of sequences of Linda-like operations to be executed atomically (e.g., like in Shared Prolog or PoliS).