G'Agent

A mobile agent system, written in Go, loosely inspired by the Agent Tcl / D'Agents system created by Robert S. Gray of Dartmouth college.

Purpose

As we move close and closer to a true space age, we need to start thinking about solutions for various light-speed issues such as the bi-directional time delay between the surface of Mars and the surface of Earth. At present it takes between 6 minutes and 44 minutes for single round-trip, making most current data services unuseable. G'Agent is a potential solution for data services given the time delay.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are on Mars and need to perform a search for data in a specific domain space. You would have to explain it to someone on Earth, and hope they understand enough of the data / domain to know where to search and understand you well enough to perform the actual search and then send you the results. With G'Agent, instead you would write a basic script, hereafter called an agent, providing various hints as to the domain space as well as the actual search. Your client would then send it on to a server on Earth. The server, hereafter called a router, may or nothing about the domain space of your search, so the router will use the hints that you provide to attempt to route the request to other routers that may understand the specific domain space. Eventually your agent will reach a router whose servers, hereafter referred to as workers, can handle your search. The workers, will take the agent, run the script portion and collect the response(s). The worker will send the response back to the router(s) that it recieved the agent from, eventually routing it back to you.

Example Agent

1 : ###################
2 : ### Hello Earth ###
3 : ###################
4 : # HINT START
5 : #  - console
6 : #  - gravity measurements
7 : #  - gravity fluctuations
8 : # HINT END
9 : function hello_world() {
10:   console.log("Hello Earth, does tempurature various alter specific gravity?")
11: }
12: console.log(hello_world())

Lines 1 - 3 are simple comments

Line 4 Tells the G'Agent router that this is the start of the hints to route for.

Lines 5 - 7 are a list of hints that the router will use to determine which router(s) may have domain specific information.

Lines 9 - 11 are a tcl function that will be executed on the worker before sending the results back to the client.

Line 12 executes the function defined above.

History

More information can be found in the original documentation, and in the project's wiki.

We are adding Picol as a vendor package though we have modified it specific to support a subset of the Agent Tcl / D'Agents language extensions. The language extensions can be found in the LANGUAGE.md file.