ICS '97 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Supercomputing
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
One model of multithreading gaining popularity onmultiprocessor systems is the message-driven model ofcomputation. The message-driven model is a reactivemodel in which an arriving message starts a block ofcomputation to process that message. The advantageof programming in such a model is that the dependencies are explicit, messages are asynchronous, and theresulting code is highly multithreaded. The message-driven model studied in this paper is the actor modelof concurrent computation. This paper presents anempirical performance study of the runtime and kernel support of the ProperCAD II C++ class librarywhich supports the actor model. The ProperCAD IIC++ class library facilitates the use of multithread-ing on parallel platforms through object-oriented de-sign techniques. The usefulness of the ProperCAD IIis shown through the results of various large, real applications. In addition to providing a useful paradigm toprogram complex parallel applications, we believe thatthe actor model integrates well with more advancedperformance feedback and visualization tools. Furtherfeedback related to multithreading will be presented inthe form of dynamically weighted actor-method callgraphs, method specific statistics, and program visualization.