Open Systems Laboratory at Illinois

Concurrent programming using actors: exploiting large-scale parallelism

By Gul Agha and Carl Hewitt. In FSTTCS, volume 206 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 19–41. Springer, 1985.

Publisher Link:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16042-6_2

Abstract

We argue that the ability to model shared objects with changing local states, dynamic reconfigurability, and inherent parallelism are desirable properties of any model of concurrency. The actor model addresses these issues in a uniform framework. This paper briefly describes the concurrent programming language ActS and the principles that have guided its development. ActS advances the state of the art in programming languages by combining the advantages of object-oriented programming with those of functional programming. We also discuss considerations relevant to large-scale parallelism in the context of open systems, and define an abstract model which establishes the equivalence of systems defined by actor programs.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{conf/fsttcs/AghaH85,
    author = "Agha, Gul and Hewitt, Carl",
    editor = "Maheshwari, S. N.",
    title = "Concurrent Programming Using Actors: Exploiting large-
             Scale Parallelism",
    booktitle = "FSTTCS",
    crossref = "conf/fsttcs/1985",
    ee = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-16042-6_2",
    pages = "19-41",
    year = "1985",
}

@proceedings{conf/fsttcs/1985,
    editor = "Maheshwari, S. N.",
    title = "Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical
             Computer Science, Fifth Conference, New Delhi, India, December
             16-18, 1985, Proceedings",
    isbn = "3-540-16042-6",
    publisher = "Springer",
    series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
    volume = "206",
    year = "1985",
}