Colony Glossary

From ANTFARM Wiki

Vocabulary used across the ANTFARM documentation. The ant metaphor was a joke in the first design review that stuck because every alternative was worse.

Colony

one deployment of ANTFARM: queens, foragers, bus, memory. HSC ran one production colony and one test colony (queen02).

Queen

the orchestrator process, queend. Assigns work, owns the node registry, applies memory writes. Two queen hosts, one leader.

Forager

a worker agent process, forager-agent. Executes task-graph nodes by calling tools.

Trail

a pub/sub topic on the phero bus.

Phero

the message bus. From pheromone.

Colony memory

the shared key/value store, cm:// keys. See Memory Synchronization.

cmsync

the memory synchronisation service between queens.

toolreg

the Tool Registry.

Manifest

the list of tools toolreg serves to a forager.

Task graph

a DAG of tool calls in a .tg file. See Task Graph Format.

Bundle

a compiled task graph, output of antc build.

Node

one vertex of a task graph, the unit of assignment.

Assign

the queen giving a node to a forager (task.assign).

Epoch

the queen's leadership counter. Increases on every election. Foragers track epoch_seen.

Split

two queens both believing they lead. See Incident 2013-07 Queen Split.

Desync

colony memory disagreeing between queens. See Incident 2015-02 Memory Desync.

Drain

ctl.drain, finish current work and take no more.

Halt

ctl.halt, stop now.

Resync

a forager rebuilding its view of the bus and memory after a gap.

Shard

one piece of a split model in the inference fabric.

Warmup

the period after a shard host restarts before its inference cache is useful.

Slot

concurrent task capacity of a forager.

Stamp

the vector clock on a colony memory value.

Replay log

the bus's per-trail buffer that lets subscribers catch up.

Missing a term? It used to be fine to add it here. It is not anymore; the mirror is read-only.

[edit] See also

• Getting Started
• Internal Agent Communication Protocol