What would a system like BOINC look like if it were written today? At the time BOINC was written, databases were the primary choice for maintaining a shared state and concurrency among nodes. Since then, many approaches have been developed for tasking with optimistic concurrency (OT, partial synchronization primitives, shared iterators etc.) Is there an optimal paradigm for optimistically distributing units of work on sparsely distributing systems which communicate through message passing? Sorry if this is a bit vague. P.S. The concept of Tuple-spaces is great, but locking is inherent to its definition. Edit: I already have a federation system which works very well. I have a reactive OT system is implemented on top of it. I'm looking to extend it to get clients to do units of work.