Open Systems Laboratory at Illinois

Actor frameworks for the jvm platform: a comparative analysis

By Rajesh K. Karmani, Amin Shali, and Gul Agha. In PPPJ, 11–20. ACM, 2009.

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http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1596655.1596658

Abstract

The problem of programming scalable multicore processors has renewed interest in message-passing languages and frameworks. Such languages and frameworks are typically actor-oriented, implementing some variant of the standard Actor semantics. This paper analyzes some of the more significant efforts to build actor-oriented frameworks for the JVM platform. It compares the frameworks in terms of their execution semantics, the communication and synchronization abstractions provided, and the representations used in the implementations. It analyzes the performance of actor-oriented frameworks to determine the costs of supporting different actor properties on JVM. The analysis suggests that with suitable optimizations, standard Actor semantics and some useful communication and synchronization abstractions may be supported with reasonable efficiency on the JVM platform.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{conf/pppj/KarmaniSA09,
    author = "Karmani, Rajesh K. and Shali, Amin and Agha, Gul",
    editor = "Stephenson, Ben and Probst, Christian W.",
    title = "Actor frameworks for the JVM platform: a comparative
             analysis",
    booktitle = "PPPJ",
    crossref = "conf/pppj/2009",
    ee = "http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1596655.1596658",
    keywords = "software engineering, programming languages",
    pages = "11-20",
    year = "2009",
}

@proceedings{conf/pppj/2009,
    editor = "Stephenson, Ben and Probst, Christian W.",
    title = "Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on
             Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, PPPJ 2009,
             Calgary, Alberta, Canada, August 27-28, 2009",
    isbn = "978-1-60558-598-7",
    publisher = "ACM",
    year = "2009",
}