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Pluggable Scheduling for the Reactor Programming Model

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Programming with Actors

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10789))

Abstract

The reactor model is a foundational programming model for distributed computing, whose focus is modularizing and composing computations and message protocols. Previous work on reactors dealt mainly with the programming model and its composability properties, but did not show how to schedule computations in reactor-based programs. In this paper, we propose a pluggable scheduling algorithm for the reactor model. The algorithm is customizable with user-defined scheduling policies. We define and prove safety and progress properties. We compare our implementation against the Akka actor framework, and show up to \(3\times \) performance improvements on standard actor benchmarks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Erlang, actor references are called process IDs.

  2. 2.

    It was shown that encoding multiple protocols in the actor model using a single actor is possible, but made easier with custom protocol description languages [37]. Conversely, protocol modularisation can also be achieved by encapsulating groups of actors, each of which handles one aspect of the protocol. A custom architecture description language was made to facilitate this type of encapsulation [5]. One goal of the reactor model is to allow modularisation in the core model, without relying on another language layer.

  3. 3.

    Users can do this explicitly in the reactor programming model, in which case the undelivered events are dropped. It is unclear to us how to achieve this using automatic GC, since there always exists a reference from the onEvent callback to the event stream object.

  4. 4.

    This is not always possible – there exist programs in which the number of events grows over time. For example, if every reactor upon receiving an event sends out two events in response, then the overall number of messages in the program grows exponentially over time. However, if there exist an execution schedule in which the number of messages in the program at any given point is bounded, then the scheduler should use that execution schedule.

  5. 5.

    In fact, check in line 3 of Fig. 2 ensures this even if schedule calls execute from multiple threads.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oracle Labs, Zürich, Switzerland

    Aleksandar Prokopec

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  1. Aleksandar Prokopec
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Correspondence to Aleksandar Prokopec .

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  1. University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

    Alessandro Ricci

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Philipp Haller

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Prokopec, A. (2018). Pluggable Scheduling for the Reactor Programming Model. In: Ricci, A., Haller, P. (eds) Programming with Actors. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10789. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_5

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