BibTeX
@MISC{Lieberman87concurrentobject-oriented,
author = {Henry Lieberman},
title = {Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming in Act 1},
year = {1987}
}
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Abstract
this paper will try to accomplish several goals (in parallel): We will argue that the actor model is an appropriate way to think about parallel computation. Since many actors may be actively sending or receiving messages at the same time, actors are inherently well suited to modelling parallel systems. We will present some specific actors which we feel should be included in the programmer's tool kit for writing parallel programs. We will show examples illustrating the use of these primitives. Futures are actors which represent the values computed by parallel processes. They can be created dynamically and disappear when they are no longer needed. Other actors may use the value of a future without concern for the feet that it was computed in parallel. Synchronization is provided by serializers, which protect actors with internal state from timing errors caused by interacting processes. We will show how these primitives have been implemented in Act 1. Act I has been implemented on a serial machine, but it simulates the kind of parallelism that would occur on a real multiprocessor machine. Discussion of the implementation will give a more concrete picture of the mechanisms involved and will also show what would be needed for an implementation on a real network of parallel processors. 12. Traditional techniques for parallelism have been inadequate
