Adapting Active Objects to Multicore Architectures

Overview & Synopsis

There are several programming paradigms that help programmers write efficient and verifiable code for distributed environments. These solutions, however, often lack proper support for local parallelism. In this article we try to improve existing solutions for providing a distributed, highly parallel framework that is easy to program. We propose an extension to the active object programming model which optimizes the local performance of applications by harnessing the full computing power of multi-core CPUs. The need for explicit locking mechanisms is reduced by the addition of meta-information to the methods in the source code. This paper describes this language-independent meta-information, and the way we intend to use it for parallelizing execution inside an active object.