Synchronization views for event-loop actors

The actor model has already proven itself as an interesting concurrency model that avoids issues such as deadlocks and race conditions by construction, and thus facilitates concurrent programming. The tradeoff is that it sacrifices expressiveness and efficiency especially with respect to data parallelism. However, many standard solutions to computationally expensive problems employ data parallel algorithms for better performance on parallel systems. We identified three problems that inhibit the use of data-parallel algorithms within the actor model. Firstly, one of the main properties of the actor model, the fact that no data is shared, is one of the most severe performance bottlenecks. Especially the fact that shared state can not be read truly in parallel. Secondly, the actor model on its own does not provide a mechanism to specify extra synchronization conditions on batches of messages which leads to event-level data-races. And lastly, programmers are forced to write code in a c...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Joeri De Koster, Stefan Marr, Theo D'Hondt
• Keywords: Concurrency Model, Continuation Passing Style, Data Parallelism, Distributed And Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2012