The TONS project

Welcome to the home of the TONS project. TONS stands for Tons Of Numerical Services. The goal of the TONS project is to create a state-of-the-art tool for scientists and engineers who wish to perform numerical investigations.

The TONS system has a three-tier architecture as shown below. A number of clients are connected to the scheduler. Each client request a calculation performed and recieve it when it has terminated. The scheduler sends the request to a number of nodes. A calculation might be parallellized by the scheduler.

We invision that the clients can be of very different nature. One could be a simple command-line calculator like bc, another could a simulation program for the solar system with a graphical user interface. Only the client-programmers' imagination is the limitation!

A quickstart guide to TONS is available here.

The fully implemented TONS system will consist of many components. They are:

• The TONS server which schedules the requests from the clients by forwarding the requests to the nodes.
• The node server that should be running on one or more machines (if TONS is running in a cluster).
• The programming language TAL. TAL is short for TONS Algoirthmic Language.
• A library of functions called STALL which stands for Standard TAL Library.
• The TONS server is a virtual machine which runs TBC (Tons ByteCode). The TBC can be created by TASM (Tons ASseMbler).
• The Simple Tons Client abbriviated STC is the TONS team's showcase of a client.

You can download the latest version of the TONS system here.

The TONS team consists of the following people:

• Jakob Østergaard (Scheduler and VM).
• Kenneth Geisshirt (TAL compiler).

The TONS project is hosted by Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group.

This page was last modified by Jakob Østergaard January 28, 2000