A Tea object acts with the property that messages sent to it are redirected to replicated copies of itself on other users' participating machines in a peer-to-peer network. This messaging protocol supports a coordinated distributed two-phase commit that is used to control the progression of computations at participating user sites. In this way messages may be dynamically redirected to large numbers of users while maintaining the appropriate deadline-based scheduling. Thus, TeaTime is designed to allow for a great deal of adaptability and resilience and works on a heterogeneous set of resources. It is a framework of abstraction that works over a range of implementations and that can be evolved and tuned over time, both within an application and across applications.
