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Showing posts from July, 2014

Is it required to use different priority in a high-performance actor system ?

I was reading a log file from an actor computation. In particular, I was looking at the outcome of a kmer counting computation performed with Argonnite, which runs on top of Thorium. Argonnite is an application in the BIOSAL project and Thorium is the engine of the BIOSAL project (which means that all BIOSAL applications run on top of Thorium). In BIOSAL, everything is an actor or a message. And these are handled by the Thorium engine. Thorium is a distributed engine. A computation with Thorium is distributed across BIOSAL runtime nodes. Each node has 1 pacing thread and 1 bunch of worker threads (for example, with 32 threads, you get 1 pacing thread and 31 workers). Each worker is responsible for a subset of the actors that live inside a given BIOSAL node. Obviously, you want each worker to have their own actors to keep every worker busy. Each worker has a scheduling queue with 4 priorities: max, high, normal, and low (these are the priority used by the Erlang ERTS called BE