Communication infratructure for a distibuted actor system

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.