THAL: An Actor System For Efficient and Scalable Concurrent Computing
Wooyoung Kim · 1997
Actors are a model of concurrent objects which unify synchronization and data abstraction boundaries. Because they hide details of parallel execution and present an abstract view of the computation, actors provide a promising building block for easy-to-use parallel programming systems. However, the practical success of the concurrent object model requires two conditions be satisfied. Flexible communication abstractions and their efficient implementations are the necessary conditions for the success of actors. This thesis studies how to support communication between actors efficiently. First, we discuss communication patterns commonly arising in many parallel applications in the context of an experimental actor-based language, THAL. The language provides as communication abstractions concurrent call/return communication, delegation, broadcast, and local synchronization constraints. The thesis shows how the abstractions are efficiently implemented on stock-hardware distributed memory mul...