Nodes (Paranodes)

Nodes are computational units such as containers on robots, servers, or devices. Anything that can run Linux, for example, is a candidate to be a node. Nodes host actors and actor instances, contain the skill maps of all actors, maintain a ledger of all actor communication within and across nodes, host the Paraflow runtime, support PnCP, implement semantic skill filtering, and host the certificate authority for the respective paranet. They form the distributed infrastructure of the Paranet for skill execution and collaboration.

Once can think of nodes as nodes of a distributed OS. While the node runs an OS (e.g. Linux, Windows), the node code is an OS for running actor instances across a network. It is at a higher abstraction level than the other code running on the underlying OS. By analogy, if the Paranet is a Distributed Network OS (DNOS), then the nodes are the distributed computational units of the DNOS that enable the programs of the DNOS (actor instances) to operate.

We sometimes use “paranode” to describe nodes of the Paranet to be more specific, but they are synonymous in a paranet context. A paranet is a name in PDNS that is attributed to each paranode/node to group nodes in the same paranet topology.