Re: [fonc] Electrical Actors?

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Casey,

 Has anyone taken the actor model down to the metal?

I studied this in detail back in 1990 and had several references. These
are physically hard for me to reach right now and probably are not easy
to find on the web.

Though not an actor model, you might find my RNA idea of objects and
messages at the transistor level interesting:

http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware/19

This text is mostly just a note to myself and probably doesn't make much
sense to other people. An animation of the idea, however, would probably
be easily understood even by children (and probably more easily by
biologists than computer scientists, hence the forced acronym from
Ring Network Architecture). I plan to work on this next year.

-- Jecel


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Re: [fonc] Electrical Actors?

[David Barbour]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Casey Ransberger
casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote:

 Has anyone taken the actor model down to the metal?


This would be difficult. We are constrained by fixed memory resources and
connectivity relationships at the hardware level. The memory limits
constrain scheduling in ways that may conflict with progress in the Actors
model. The limited hardware connectivity means we cannot arbitrarily share
references as first-class between actors.


 Another thought I had was using some nice symmetry that would let the
 processor do more than one thing at once. Of course if I shipped a
 microprocessor that had weird deadlock issues, I'd be inclined to call it a
 lemon.


If you are not fixated on actors, I suggest you pursue other concurrency
models: synchronous dataflow (Lustre, Estrel), Kahn process networks,
clockless logic (e.g. Karl Font), event calculus, FRP, RDP, et cetera.
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