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

Towards a Theory of Glue

We propose and study the notions of behaviour type and composition operator making a first step towards the definition of a formal framework for studying behaviour composition in a setting sufficiently general to provide insight into how the component-based systems should be modelled and compared. We illustrate the proposed notions on classical examples (Traces, Labelled Transition Systems and Coalgebras). Finally, the definition of memoryless glue operators, takes us one step closer to a formal understanding of the separation of concerns principle stipulating that computational aspects of a system should be localised within its atomic components, whereas coordination layer responsible for managing concurrency should be realised by memoryless glue operators.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2012, arXiv:1212.345

Sequentiality vs. Concurrency in Games and Logic

Connections between the sequentiality/concurrency distinction and the semantics of proofs are investigated, with particular reference to games and Linear Logic.Comment: 35 pages, appeared in Mathematical Structures in Computer Scienc

Productive Development of Scalable Network Functions with NFork

Despite decades of research, developing correct and scalable concurrent programs is still challenging. Network functions (NFs) are not an exception. This paper presents NFork, a system that helps NF domain experts to productively develop concurrent NFs by abstracting away concurrency from developers. The key scheme behind NFork's design is to exploit NF characteristics to overcome the limitations of prior work on concurrency programming. Developers write NFs as sequential programs, and during runtime, NFork performs transparent parallelization by processing packets in different cores. Exploiting NF characteristics, NFork leverages transactional memory and develops efficient concurrent data structures to achieve scalability and guarantee the absence of concurrency bugs. Since NFork manages concurrency, it further provides (i) a profiler that reveals the root causes of scalability bottlenecks inherent to the NF's semantics and (ii) actionable recipes for developers to mitigate these root causes by relaxing the NF's semantics. We show that NFs developed with NFork achieve competitive scalability with those in Cisco VPP [16], and NFork's profiler and recipes can effectively aid developers in optimizing NF scalability.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

How functional programming mattered

In 1989 when functional programming was still considered a niche topic, Hughes wrote a visionary paper arguing convincingly ‘why functional programming matters’. More than two decades have passed. Has functional programming really mattered? Our answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’. Functional programming is now at the forefront of a new generation of programming technologies, and enjoying increasing popularity and influence. In this paper, we review the impact of functional programming, focusing on how it has changed the way we may construct programs, the way we may verify programs, and fundamentally the way we may think about programs