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Adaptable Actors: Just What The World Needs

Published: 28 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The combination of improved battery technology and more power-efficient computing hardware has led to the proliferation of heterogeneous distributed systems. This internet of things consists of embedded, wearable, hobbyist, parallel, and commodity devices. Given the different resource and power constraints of such systems, applications must be able to reconfigure or adapt their runtime execution environment in order to make best use of the resources available. In order for the underlying operating system/runtime to support runtime adaptation, an application must be suitably designed. The actor model of computation presents a natural fit for programming such adaptive systems with shared-nothing semantics and use of message passing. This paper addresses the limitations of current actor approaches and argues that an actor is the appropriate unit of adaptation. This is justified through experimentation across heterogeneous platforms.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PLOS '17: Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems
October 2017
62 pages
ISBN:9781450351539
DOI:10.1145/3144555
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 28 October 2017

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  1. actors
  2. adaptation
  3. heterogeneous hardware

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