On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrie...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Has anyone taken the actor model down to the metal?
If someone has, I would sure like to hear about it! There was the Apiary machine, but I don't think that was ever physically built, only simulated. This is a concept that has been kicked around several times over the last couple of years among some of my collaborators. It is one of the reasons why I ported the actor core runtime to the Arduino, to get a step closer to the metal. The SEND and BECOME primitives seem fairly straight-forward to translate to hardware. It is the CREATE primitive that I struggle with. Since we can't actually "create" new hardware elements, it seems like it would have to be virtualized in some way. Perhaps it would be sufficient to virtualize it the same way we virtualize processes, simulating multi-processing on a smaller number of cores. Maybe there would be some way to activate latent nodes of processing power, injecting them with their initial behavior as a way of breathing life into them. It could be just a matter of "allocating" new actors the way we allocate memory. Each hardware node could have a capacity of available actors who only need a script to become alive. I would love to explore this idea further and hear how you would consider approaching the problem. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
