Colony Glossary
===============
Source: ANTFARM Wiki (mirror) — https://swarmglass.quantara.cv/wiki/Colony_Glossary
Last modified: 2015-07-07 · Revisions: 28 · Status: current
Categories: Reference
Archive ref: QUANTARA-SWARMGLASS-R13-D5CDB9

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.

== See also ==

- Getting Started
- Internal Agent Communication Protocol