Master's Papers and Projects

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Browsing Master's Papers and Projects by Subject "Actor (Computer program language)"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Actor systems platform design and implementation of the actor paradigm in a distributed object-oriented environment
    Joshi, Nandan (Virginia Tech, 1993-08-05)
    This project was undertaken as part of an effort to explore the design of object -oriented systems that are distributed, concurrent, real-time and/or embedded in nature. This work seeks to integrate the concurrency features of the actor model in a distributed, object oriented environment, ESP. The integrated system, called the Actor Systems Platform (ASP), provides a platform for designing concurrent, distributed applications. The actor model provides a mechanism for expressing the inherent concurrency in an application. The concurrency in the application can be exploited by the distributed features available in ESP. The actor abstraction in ASP is provided by a application-level class hierarchy in ESP. The message passing semantics of the actor model are implemented by using special operator overloading in C++. Cboxes are implemented to provide a synchronization mechanism and a means of returning replies. In a concurrent system, simultaneous execution of an object's methods can cause its state to be inconsistent. This is prevented by providing a method locking mechanism using behavior sets. While integrating the concurrency features of the actor model in an object-oriented environment, differences were encountered in determining the invocation semantics of the actor model and those of inherited methods. The problem is investigated and a taxonomy of solutions is presented.
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    Communication infratructure for a distibuted actor system
    Gandhi, Rajiv (Virginia Tech, 1994-06-15)
    The goal of this project was to develop part of the environment that would allow the creation of distributed applications in ACT++. ACT++ is a programming framework in which concurrent object-oriented programs can be written in C++. The concurrent objects in ACT ++ are called actors. Specifically, the project is concerned with the development of a communication infrastructure that configures a collection of heterogeneous machines for use in the distributed version of ACT++. A utility, "ActorControl," was implemented through which the user can specify how ACT ++ is to run on each of the nodes by means of a configuration file. The "ActorControl" utility starts a process on each of the nodes specified in the configuration file and establishes TCP socket based connections among all of them. To simplify the communication between the different nodes, a special type of actor called an interface actor is used. Instead of issuing communication requests directly to sockets, a request is directed to an interface actor that is responsible for that socket. A related project is concerned with the problems of creation, destruction and invocation of the methods on the remote machine. Thus the project consists of two parts. The first part is the implementation of the "Actor Control" utility that establishes socket connections among all the nodes participating in the distributed ACT ++. The second part is the implementation of the interface actors that are present at each end of the connection between any pair of machines.