Abstract While the actor model of concurrency is well appreciated for its ease of use, its scalability is often criticized. Indeed, the fact that execution within an actor is sequential prevents certain actor systems to take advantage of multicore architectures. In order to combine scalability and ease of use, we propose Parallel Actor Monitors (PAMs), as a means to relax the sequentiality of intra-actor activity in a structured and controlled way. A \PAM\ is a modular, reusable scheduler that permits one to introduce intra-actor parallelism in a local and abstract manner. \PAM\ allows the stepwise refinement of local parallelism within a system on a per-actor basis, without having to deal with low-level synchronization details and locks. We present the general model of \PAM\ and its instantiation in the AmbientTalk language. Benchmarks confirm the expected performance gain.
%0 Journal Article
%1 scholliers2010parallel
%A Scholliers, Christophe
%A Tanter, Éric
%A De Meuter, Wolfgang
%D 2013
%I Elsevier
%J Science of Computer Programming
%K Actors Monitors PAM Parallelism locks scheduling
%R 10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.011
%T Parallel Actor Monitors: Disentangling task-level parallelism from data partitioning in the actor model
%X Abstract While the actor model of concurrency is well appreciated for its ease of use, its scalability is often criticized. Indeed, the fact that execution within an actor is sequential prevents certain actor systems to take advantage of multicore architectures. In order to combine scalability and ease of use, we propose Parallel Actor Monitors (PAMs), as a means to relax the sequentiality of intra-actor activity in a structured and controlled way. A \PAM\ is a modular, reusable scheduler that permits one to introduce intra-actor parallelism in a local and abstract manner. \PAM\ allows the stepwise refinement of local parallelism within a system on a per-actor basis, without having to deal with low-level synchronization details and locks. We present the general model of \PAM\ and its instantiation in the AmbientTalk language. Benchmarks confirm the expected performance gain.
@article{scholliers2010parallel,
abstract = {Abstract While the actor model of concurrency is well appreciated for its ease of use, its scalability is often criticized. Indeed, the fact that execution within an actor is sequential prevents certain actor systems to take advantage of multicore architectures. In order to combine scalability and ease of use, we propose Parallel Actor Monitors (PAMs), as a means to relax the sequentiality of intra-actor activity in a structured and controlled way. A \{PAM\} is a modular, reusable scheduler that permits one to introduce intra-actor parallelism in a local and abstract manner. \{PAM\} allows the stepwise refinement of local parallelism within a system on a per-actor basis, without having to deal with low-level synchronization details and locks. We present the general model of \{PAM\} and its instantiation in the AmbientTalk language. Benchmarks confirm the expected performance gain. },
added-at = {2011-12-26T18:55:45.000+0100},
author = {Scholliers, Christophe and Tanter, Éric and De Meuter, Wolfgang},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2d974db47b7d9950cfd130eec243cf9b6/gron},
doi = {10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.011},
interhash = {350b49343aaa4632850e2efff8eade39},
intrahash = {d974db47b7d9950cfd130eec243cf9b6},
issn = {0167-6423},
journal = {Science of Computer Programming},
keywords = {Actors Monitors PAM Parallelism locks scheduling},
month = {April},
publisher = {Elsevier},
timestamp = {2013-10-29T14:23:32.000+0100},
title = {Parallel Actor Monitors: Disentangling task-level parallelism from data partitioning in the actor model},
year = 2013
}