Revisiting Actor Programming in C++

The actor model of computation has gained significant popularity over the last decade. Its high level of abstraction makes it appealing for concurrent applications in parallel and distributed systems. However, designing a real-world actor framework that subsumes full scalability, strong reliability, and high resource efficiency requires many conceptual and algorithmic additives to the original model. In this paper, we report on designing and building CAF, the "C++ Actor Framework". CAF targets at providing a concurrent and distributed native environment for scaling up to very large, high-performance applications, and equally well down to small constrained systems. We present the key specifications and design concepts---in particular a message-transparent architecture, type-safe message interfaces, and pattern matching facilities---that make native actors a viable approach for many robust, elastic, and highly distributed developments. We demonstrate the feasibility of CAF in three scenarios: first for elastic, upscaling environments, second for including heterogeneous hardware like GPGPUs, and third for distributed runtime systems. Extensive performance evaluations indicate ideal runtime behaviour for up to 64 cores at very low memory footprint, or in the presence of GPUs. In these tests, CAF continuously outperforms the competing actor environments Erlang, Charm++, SalsaLite, Scala, ActorFoundry, and even the OpenMPI.Comment: 33 page

Object-oriented modelling with unified modelling language 2.0 for simple software application based on agile methodology

Unified modelling language (UML) 2.0 introduced in 2002 has been developing and influencing object-oriented software engineering and has become a standard and reference for information system analysis and design modelling. There are many concepts and theories to model the information system or software application with UML 2.0, which can make ambiguities and inconsistencies for a novice to learn to how to model the system with UML especially with UML 2.0. This article will discuss how to model the simple software application by using some of the diagrams of UML 2.0 and not by using the whole diagrams as suggested by agile methodology. Agile methodology is considered as convenient for novices because it can deliver the information technology environment to the end-user quickly and adaptively with minimal documentation. It also has the ability to deliver best performance software application according to the customer's needs. Agile methodology will make simple model with simple documentation, simple team and simple tools.Comment: 15 pages, 30 figure

Actors that Unify Threads and Events

There is an impedance mismatch between message-passing concurrency and virtual machines, such as the JVM. VMs usually map their threads to heavyweight OS processes. Without a lightweight process abstraction, users are often forced to write parts of concurrent applications in an event-driven style which obscures control flow, and increases the burden on the programmer. In this paper we show how thread-based and event-based programming can be unified under a single actor abstraction. Using advanced abstraction mechanisms of the Scala programming language, we implemented our approach on unmodified JVMs. Our programming model integrates well with the threading model of the underlying VM

Enterprise architecture for small and medium-sized enterprises

Enterprise architecture (EA) is used as a holistic approach to keep things aligned in a company. Some emphasize the use of EA to align IT with the business, others see it broader and use it to also keep the processes aligned with the strategy. Although a lot of research is being done on EA, still hardly anything is known about its use in the context of a small and medium sized enterprise (SME). Because of some specific characteristics of SMEs, it is interesting to look how EA can be applied in a SME. In this PhD, we present an approach for EA for SMEs, which combines four dimensions to get a holistic overview, while keeping things aligned. The approach is developed with special attention towards the characteristics of SMEs. Case studies are used to refine the metamodel and develop an adequate method, while tool support is being developed to enable the validation rounds