The actor model of computation

-


This video has Professor Carl Hewitt in it. Hewitt is the original creator of the concept of actors.

Hewitt created the concept of actors in 1973 with Bishop, and Steiger.
Everything is in this paper and it's 11 page.


If you have little time, you can read only the bottom of page 12 of Gul Agha's PhD thesis.
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6952/AITR-844.pdf  page 12, section "2.1.3 Actors"


If you have more time:


Baker was a PhD student with Hewitt. He and Hewitt wrote the "laws of actors" in 1977 (see below).
Agha was also a PhD student with Hewitt and he reformulated the concepts in his thesis.

After that, Joe Armstrong (at Ericsson) advanced the subject (he also did his PhD on the topic).

Anyway, below are the 4 most important pieces of work in the literature (according to me).


Hewitt, Bishop, Steiger 1973    
Hewitt, C., Bishop, P. & Steiger, R. A universal modular ACTOR formalism for artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of the 3rd international joint conference on Artificial intelligence, IJCAI'73, 235-245 (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 1973). URL http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1624804.    
http://ijcai.org/Past%20Proceedings/IJCAI-73/PDF/027B.pdf

Introduced concepts: actor, message, script, create actors, spawn actors

 
Hewitt & Baker 1977    
Hewitt, C. & Baker, H. Laws for communicating parallel processes. Tech. Rep., MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1977). URL http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41962.    
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41962/AI_WP_134A.pdf

Contains a lot of useful information for readers. In particular this paper underlines the importance of acquaintances.


Agha 1986
Agha, G. Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1986). URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=7929.    
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6952/AITR-844.pdf

On page 12 (2.1.3), the actor model is formally specified.


Armstrong 2003    
Armstrong, J. Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003). URL http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.3.408.    
http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

Erlang is really a neat language.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A survey of the burgeoning industry of cloud genomics

-
Image
I like lists. Here is a list of companies in the cloud genomics industry. Table 1: Companies acting in the industry of cloud genomics. The list is in no particular order. Company Products People Founded Link GenoSpace, LLC - GenoSpace platform - John Quackenbush (CEO) 2011 https://www.genospace.com/ DNAnexus, Inc. - DNAnexus Platform - DNAnexus Platform SDK (a.k.a. dx-toolkit) - Serafim Batzoglou (co-founder) - Andreas Sundquist (co-founder and CTO) - a bunch of other famous people in the field 2009 https://dnanexus.com/ Seven Bridges Genomics, Inc. - IGOR - IGOR Python SDK - Igor Bogicevic (CTO) 2009 https://www.sbgenomics.com/ BGI - EasyGenomics - Xing Xu (Senior Product Manager) Introduced in 2012 https://www.easygenomics.com/ Illumina, Inc. - BaseSpace™ - BaseSpace API - Alex Dickinson (SVP of Cloud Genomics) Introduced in 2011 https://basespace.illumina.com/ Era7 Information Technologies SLU - BG7...
Read more

Generating neural machine instructions for multi-head attention

-
  An animal can do training and inference every day of its existence until the day of its death. A forward pass is all you need.   Here is the current model configuration that I use for multi-head attention:         let sequence_length = 6;         let vocab_size = 20;         let n_embd = 64;         let num_heads = 8; You can see the full model here: https://github.com/sebhtml/novigrad/blob/8df6192829edd9cda3a221e12affa770fbda2a1b/src/models/mega_man_attention.rs The struct uses Embedding, MultiHeadAttention, Linear, Softmax: struct MegaManAttentionModel {     input_shape: Vec<usize>,     output_shape: Vec<usize>,     vocab_size: usize,     sequence_length: usize,     embedding: Embedding,     multi_head_attention: MultiHeadAttention, ...
Read more

Adding ZVOL VIRTIO disks to a guest running on a host with the FreeBSD BHYVE hypervisor

-
On atlantis.domain (my FreeBSD BHYVE hypervisor host), I use these commands: Install FreeBSD on a 10G disk. vm create -s 10G guestname   vm install FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img vm console guestname Add 8 30GB zvol-based disks vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname vm add -d disk -t zvol -s 30G guestname You will need to do vm poweroff guestname vm start guestname because the guest does not seem to see the 8 30GB without power cycling. (rebooting won't work) *** If you want the boot disk (the one create by "vm create") to be a zvol, you must edit the template: root@atlantis:~ # zfs snapshot tank/vm-bhyve@2020-06-11-2145 root@atlantis:~ # mount -t zfs tank/vm-bhyve@2020-06-11-2145 /tank/vm-bhyve@2020-06-11-2145 r...
Read more