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Tanks: Multiple reader, single writer actors

De Koster, Joeri, Marr, Stefan, D'Hondt, Theo, Van Cutsem, Tom (2013) Tanks: Multiple reader, single writer actors. In: Proceedings of AGERE! 2013, 3rd International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control. (KAR id:63834)

Abstract

In the past, the Actor Model has mainly been explored in a distributed context. However, more and more application developers are also starting to use it to program shared-memory multicore machines because of the safety guarantees it provides. It avoids issues such as deadlocks and race conditions by construction, and thus facilitates concurrent programming. The tradeoff is that the Actor Model sacrifices expressiveness with respect to accessing shared state because actors are fully isolated from each other (a.k.a. "shared-nothing parallelism"). There is a need for more high level synchronization mechanisms that integrate with the actor model without sacrificing the safety and liveness guarantees it provides. This paper introduces a variation on the communicating event-loops actor model called the Tank model. A tank is an actor that can expose part of its state as a shared read-only resource. The model ensures that any other actor will always observe a consistent version of that state, even in the face of concurrent updates of the actor that owns that state.

Item Type: Conference or workshop item (Paper)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Computing, Engineering and Mathematical Sciences > School of Computing
Depositing User: Stefan Marr
Date Deposited: 26 Dec 2017 17:36 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 10:24 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/63834 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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