Actor languages for specification of parallel computations
Gul Agha, Wooyoung Kim, Rajendra Panwar · DIMACS series in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science · 1994
. We describe high-level language constructs for specifying parallel programs and show how they may be used to provide modular specification of communication, synchronization and placement. The high-level constructs are translated into actors which provide flexible low-level primitives for interconnecting distributed components and efficient execution on concurrent computers. We argue that our linguistic constructs allow parallel program specifications that are easier to reason about and efficient to implement. 1. Introduction Current methods for programming parallel computers involve very low-level mechanisms which allow efficient execution only on particular architectures. In order to raise the level of abstraction at which programs are specified, a number of requirements must be met by high-level languages for parallel computing. Specifically, in order for high-level parallel languages to be practical they must: ffl provide constructs which abstract over the coordination structure...