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Improving the Performance of Actors on Multi-cores with Parallel Patterns

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Abstract

The Actor-based programming model is largely used in the context of distributed systems for its message-passing semantics and neat separation between the concurrency model and the underlying hardware platform. However, in the context of a single multi-core node where the performance metric is the primary optimization objective, the “pure” Actor Model is generally not used because Actors cannot exploit the physical shared-memory, thus reducing the optimization options. In this work, we propose to enrich the Actor Model with some well-known Parallel Patterns to face the performance issues of using the “pure” Actor Model on a single multi-core platform. In the experimental study, conducted on two different multi-core systems by using the C++ Actor Framework, we considered a subset of the Parsec benchmarks and two Savina benchmarks. The analysis of results demonstrates that the Actor Model enriched with suitable Parallel Patterns implementations provides a robust abstraction layer capable of delivering performance results comparable with those of thread-based libraries (i.e. Pthreads and FastFlow) while offering a safer and versatile programming environment.

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Notes

  1. The implementations are available at https://github.com/ParaGroup/caf-pp.

  2. Application code available at https://github.com/ParaGroup/caf-pp.

  3. Application code available in the \(\hbox {P}^3\)ARSEC repository at https://github.com/ParaGroup/p3arsec.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Luca Rinaldi, Massimo Torquati, Daniele De Sensi, Gabriele Mencagli & Marco Danelutto

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  1. Luca Rinaldi
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  2. Massimo Torquati
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  3. Daniele De Sensi
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  4. Gabriele Mencagli
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  5. Marco Danelutto
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Correspondence to Massimo Torquati.

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This work has been partially supported by University of Pisa PRA 2018 66 DECLware: Declarative methodologies for designing and deploying applications.

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Rinaldi, L., Torquati, M., De Sensi, D. et al. Improving the Performance of Actors on Multi-cores with Parallel Patterns. Int J Parallel Prog 48, 692–712 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-020-00663-1

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