A Configurable Transport Layer for CAF

The message-driven nature of actors lays a foundation for developing scalable and distributed software. While the actor itself has been thoroughly modeled, the message passing layer lacks a common definition. Properties and guarantees of message exchange often shift with implementations and contexts. This adds complexity to the development process, limits portability, and removes transparency from distributed actor systems. In this work, we examine actor communication, focusing on the implementation and runtime costs of reliable and ordered delivery. Both guarantees are often based on TCP for remote messaging, which mixes network transport with the semantics of messaging. However, the choice of transport may follow different constraints and is often governed by deployment. As a first step towards re-architecting actor-to-actor communication, we decouple the messaging guarantees from the transport protocol. We validate our approach by redesigning the network stack of the C++ Actor Framework (CAF) so that it allows to combine an arbitrary transport protocol with additional functions for remote messaging. An evaluation quantifies the cost of composability and the impact of individual layers on the entire stack

Managing competences in entrepreneurial technology firms: a comparative institutional analysis of Germany, Sweden and the UK

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and development programmes. They therefore encourage high levels of flexibility in acquiring and using skilled staff. Appropriability risks, on the other hand, encourage innovative firms to develop organisation-specific competences through investing in complementary assets, such as marketing and distribution capabilities, that involve longer-term employer-employee commitments to building complex organisations. These connections between technology risks and employment policies help to explain why different kinds of market economies with contrasting labour market institutions develop varied innovation patterns. This study focuses on subsectors of the computer software and biotechnology industries in three distinct Europea n countries, UK, Germany and Sweden, that vary in their level of technical change and appropriability.n/a

The role of concurrency in an evolutionary view of programming abstractions

In this paper we examine how concurrency has been embodied in mainstream programming languages. In particular, we rely on the evolutionary talking borrowed from biology to discuss major historical landmarks and crucial concepts that shaped the development of programming languages. We examine the general development process, occasionally deepening into some language, trying to uncover evolutionary lineages related to specific programming traits. We mainly focus on concurrency, discussing the different abstraction levels involved in present-day concurrent programming and emphasizing the fact that they correspond to different levels of explanation. We then comment on the role of theoretical research on the quest for suitable programming abstractions, recalling the importance of changing the working framework and the way of looking every so often. This paper is not meant to be a survey of modern mainstream programming languages: it would be very incomplete in that sense. It aims instead at pointing out a number of remarks and connect them under an evolutionary perspective, in order to grasp a unifying, but not simplistic, view of the programming languages development process

A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs

The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated citation

Scaling Virtualized Smartphone Images in the Cloud

Üks selle Bakalaureuse töö eesmärkidest oli Android-x86 nutitelefoni platvormi juurutamine pilvekeskkonda ja välja selgitamine, kas valitud instance on piisav virtualiseeritud nutitelefoni platvormi juurutamiseks ning kui palju koormust see talub. Töös kasutati Amazoni instance'i M1 Small, mis oli piisav, et juurutada Androidi virtualiseeritud platvormi, kuid jäi kesisemaks kui mobiiltelefon, millel teste läbi viidi. M1 Medium instance'i tüüp oli sobivam ja näitas paremaid tulemusi võrreldes telefoniga. Teostati koormusteste selleks vastava tööriistaga Tsung, et näha, kui palju üheaegseid kasutajaid instance talub. Testi läbiviimiseks paigaldasime Dalviku instance'ile Tomcat serveri. Pärast teste ühe eksemplariga, juurutasime külge Elastic Load Balancing ja automaatse skaleerimise Amazon Auto Scaling tööriista. Esimene neist jaotas koormust instance'ide vahel. Automaatse skaleerimise tööriista kasutasime, et rakendada horisontaalset skaleerimist meie Android-x86 instance'le. Kui CPU tõusis üle 60% kauemaks kui üks minut, siis tehti eelmisele identne instance ja koormust saadeti edaspidi sinna. Seda protseduuri vajadusel korrati maksimum kümne instance'ini. Meie teostusel olid tagasilöögid, sest Elastic Load Balancer aegus 60 sekundi pärast ning me ei saanud kõikide välja saadetud päringutele vastuseid. Serverisse saadetud faili kirjutamine ja kompileerimine olid kulukad tegevused ja seega ei lõppenud kõik 60 sekundi jooksul. Me ei saanud koos Load Balancer'iga läbiviidud testidest piisavalt andmeid, et teha järeldusi, kas virtualiseeritud nutitelefoni platvorm Android on hästi või halvasti skaleeruv.In this thesis we deployed a smartphone image in an Amazon EC2 instance and ran stress tests on them to know how much users can one instance bear and how scalable it is. We tested how much time would a method run in a physical Android device and in a cloud instance. We deployed CyanogenMod and Dalvik for a single instance. We used Tsung for stress testing. For those tests we also made a Tomcat server on Dalvik instance that would take the incoming file, the file would be compiled with java and its class file would be wrapped into dex, a Dalvik executable file, that is later executed with Dalvik. Three instances made a Tsung cluster that sent load to a Dalvik Virtual Machine instance. For scaling we used Amazon Auto Scaling tool and Elastic Load Balancer that divided incoming load between the instances

Logic programming in the context of multiparadigm programming: the Oz experience

Oz is a multiparadigm language that supports logic programming as one of its major paradigms. A multiparadigm language is designed to support different programming paradigms (logic, functional, constraint, object-oriented, sequential, concurrent, etc.) with equal ease. This article has two goals: to give a tutorial of logic programming in Oz and to show how logic programming fits naturally into the wider context of multiparadigm programming. Our experience shows that there are two classes of problems, which we call algorithmic and search problems, for which logic programming can help formulate practical solutions. Algorithmic problems have known efficient algorithms. Search problems do not have known efficient algorithms but can be solved with search. The Oz support for logic programming targets these two problem classes specifically, using the concepts needed for each. This is in contrast to the Prolog approach, which targets both classes with one set of concepts, which results in less than optimal support for each class. To explain the essential difference between algorithmic and search programs, we define the Oz execution model. This model subsumes both concurrent logic programming (committed-choice-style) and search-based logic programming (Prolog-style). Instead of Horn clause syntax, Oz has a simple, fully compositional, higher-order syntax that accommodates the abilities of the language. We conclude with lessons learned from this work, a brief history of Oz, and many entry points into the Oz literature.Comment: 48 pages, to appear in the journal "Theory and Practice of Logic Programming