Parallel programming and complexity analysis using Actors

Abstract

We describe Actors, a flexible, scalable and efficient model of computation, and develop a framework for analyzing the parallel complexity of programs written in it. Actors are asynchronous, autonomous objects which interact by message-passing. The data and process decomposition inherent in Actors simplifies modeling real-world systems. High-level concurrent programming abstractions have been developed to simplify program development using Actors; such abstractions do not compromise an efficient and portable implementation. In this paper, we define a parallel complexity model for Actors. The model we develop gives an accurate measure of performance on realistic architectures. We illustrate its use by analyzing a number of examples.