Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems

by Gul Agha

Overview

The transition from sequential to parallel computation is an area of critical concern in today's computer technology, particularly in architecture, programming languages, systems, and artificial intelligence. This book addresses central issues in concurrency, and by producing both a syntactic definition and a denotational model of Hewitt's actor paradigm—a model of computation specifically aimed at constructing and analyzing distributed large-scale parallel systems—it substantially advances the understanding of parallel computation.

Contents
Introduction • General Design Decisions • Computation in ACTOR Systems • A More Expressive Language • A Model for ACTOR Systems • Concurrency Issues • Abstraction and Compositionality • Conclusions

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262511414
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	12/17/1986
Series:	MIT Press Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	190
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gul Agha is Director of the Open Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Table of Contents

List of Figures p.xi
Series Foreword p.xiii
Preface p.xv
1 Introduction p.1
2 General Design Decisions p.5
3 Computation In Actor Systems p.21
4 A More Expressive Language p.45
5 A Model For Actor Systems p.69
6 Concurrency Issues p.89
7 Abstraction And Compositionality p.101
8 Conclusions p.119
A Asynchronous Communication Trees p.123
B A Glossary Of Actor Terms p.131
References p.137
Index p.141

What People are Saying About This

John H. Holland

The model described is more powerful than previous ones because it provides for dynamic growth and reconfiguration, and it uses an open systems approach. This extension is essential for work in artificial intelligence and related areas where it is difficult, in typical applications to make advanced estimates of the computational resources required. The Feynman-like diagrams Agha introduces are a particularly good technique for illustrating the interactions in asynchronous, concurrent systems. They should find increasing use in serious studies of the problems accompanying parallelism. Overall, this is a seminal piece of work, carefully tied to previous research.

From the Publisher

"The model described is more powerful than previous ones because it provides for dynamic growth and reconfiguration, and it uses an open systems approach. This extension is essential for work in artificial intelligence and related areas where it is difficult, in typical applications to make advanced estimates of the computational resources required. The Feynman-like diagrams Agha introduces are a particularly good technique for illustrating the interactions in asynchronous, concurrent systems. They should find increasing use in serious studies of the problems accompanying parallelism. Overall, this is a seminal piece of work,carefully tied to previous research." John H. Holland, University of Michigan

Endorsement

The model described is more powerful than previous ones because it provides for dynamic growth and reconfiguration, and it uses an open systems approach. This extension is essential for work in artificial intelligence and related areas where it is difficult, in typical applications to make advanced estimates of the computational resources required. The Feynman-like diagrams Agha introduces are a particularly good technique for illustrating the interactions in asynchronous, concurrent systems. They should find increasing use in serious studies of the problems accompanying parallelism. Overall, this is a seminal piece of work, carefully tied to previous research.

—John H. Holland, University of Michigan