Revisiting actor programming in C++

Charousset, Dominik; Hiesgen, Raphael; Schmidt, Thomas C.

doi:10.1016/j.cl.2016.01.002

Cited by 33 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…The source of the simplicity of our actor model implementation is a departure from the classical approach proposed by Agha [7] and implemented in the famous actor frameworks and languages, for example, Erlang [8], Scala [9], CAF [2] and others.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This result is obtained despite the fact that we used the expressive possibilities of C ++ Standard Library 11 to simplify the code, neglecting the efficiency. If necessary, it can be optimized by using the primitive compare-and-swap, as proposed in [2], and by work stealing algorithms [6].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The aim of the work is (1) to present a scalable, build-in implementation of the ac-tor model in C++11, (2) demonstrate the effectiveness of the implementation by using high-performance computing test.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the main features of the actor model is the ability to describe an unbounded natural parallelism. Therefore, actively developing technologies such as the infrastructure software, Internet of Things and high performance computing, which uses massively parallel computations, fit well into the concept of actors [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Performance Analysis of a Simple Runtime System for Actor Programming in C++

Vostokin¹,

Skoryupina²

2017

Collection of Selected Papers of the III International Conference on Information Technology and Nanotechnology

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In this paper, we propose the Templet -a runtime system for actor programming of high performance computing in C++. We provide a compact source code of the runtime system, which uses standard library of C++ 11 only. We demonstrate how it differs from the classic implementations of the actor model. The practical significance of the Templet was examined by comparative study on the performance of three applications: the reference code in C ++, managed by the OpenMP; the actor code in C ++, managed by the Templet; the actor code in Java, managed by the Akka. As a test problem we used a numerical algorithm for solving the heat equation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Performance Analysis of a Simple Runtime System for Actor Programming in C++

Vostokin¹,

Skoryupina²

2017

Collection of Selected Papers of the III International Conference on Information Technology and Nanotechnology

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“…The C++ Actor framework (CAF) [10,11] combines the benefits of native program execution with a high level of abstraction. The best known implementations of the actor model, Erlang and Akka, are both implemented in languages that rely on virtual machines.…”

Section: The C++ Actor Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

A configurable transport layer for CAF

Hiesgen

Charousset

Schmidt

2018

Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

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The message-driven nature of actors lays a foundation for developing scalable and distributed software. While the actor itself has been thoroughly modeled, the message passing layer lacks a common definition. Properties and guarantees of message exchange often shift with implementations and contexts. This adds complexity to the development process, limits portability, and removes transparency from distributed actor systems.In this work, we examine actor communication, focusing on the implementation and runtime costs of reliable and ordered delivery. Both guarantees are often based on TCP for remote messaging, which mixes network transport with the semantics of messaging. However, the choice of transport may follow different constraints and is often governed by deployment. As a first step towards rearchitecting actor-to-actor communication, we decouple the messaging guarantees from the transport protocol. We validate our approach by redesigning the network stack of the C++ Actor Framework (CAF) so that it allows to combine an arbitrary transport protocol with additional functions for remote messaging. An evaluation quantifies the cost of composability and the impact of individual layers on the entire stack.

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OpenCL Actors – Adding Data Parallelism to Actor-Based Programming with CAF

Hiesgen

Charousset

Schmidt

2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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The actor model of computation has been designed for a seamless support of concurrency and distribution. However, it remains unspecific about data parallel program flows, while available processing power of modern many core hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) or coprocessors increases the relevance of data parallelism for general-purpose computation.In this work, we introduce OpenCL-enabled actors to the C++ Actor Framework (CAF). This offers a high level interface for accessing any OpenCL device without leaving the actor paradigm. The new type of actor is integrated into the runtime environment of CAF and gives rise to transparent message passing in distributed systems on heterogeneous hardware. Following the actor logic in CAF, OpenCL kernels can be composed while encapsulated in C++ actors, hence operate in a multi-stage fashion on data resident at the GPU. Developers are thus enabled to build complex data parallel programs from primitives without leaving the actor paradigm, nor sacrificing performance. Our evaluations on commodity GPUs, an Nvidia TESLA, and an Intel PHI reveal the expected linear scaling behavior when offloading larger workloads. For sub-second duties, the efficiency of offloading was found to largely differ between devices. Moreover, our findings indicate a negligible overhead over programming with the native OpenCL API.computing has been widely recognized as an important optimization strategy. In addition, accelerating coprocessors that better support code branching established on the market.Since not all tasks can benefit from such specialized devices, developers need to distribute work on the various architectural elements. Managing such a heterogeneous runtime environment inherently increases the complexity. While some loop-based computations can be offloaded to GPUs using OpenACC [10] or recent versions of OpenMP [15] with relatively little programming effort, it has been shown that a consistent task-oriented design exploits the available parallelism more efficiently. Corresponding results achieve better performance [27] while they are also applicable to more complex work loads. However, manually orchestrating tasks between multiple devices is an error-prone and complex task.The actor model of computation describes applications in terms of isolated software entities-actorsthat communicate by asynchronous message passing. Actors can be distributed across any number of processors or machines by the runtime system as they are not allowed to share state and thus can always be executed in parallel. The message-based decoupling of software entities further enables actors to run on different devices in a heterogeneous environment. Hence, the actor model can simplify software development by hiding the complexity of heterogeneous and distributed deployments.In this work, we take up our previous contribution [22] about actors programmed with OpenCLthe Open Computing Language standardized by the Khronos Group [41]. We enhance the integration of heterogeneous programming with the C++ ...

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Revisiting actor programming in C++

Cited by 33 publications

References 61 publications

Performance Analysis of a Simple Runtime System for Actor Programming in C++

Performance Analysis of a Simple Runtime System for Actor Programming in C++

A configurable transport layer for CAF

OpenCL Actors – Adding Data Parallelism to Actor-Based Programming with CAF

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