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ElasticActor: An Actor System with Automatic Granularity Adjustment

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Abstract

The actor model has gained significant popularity in recent years, because its high-level abstraction facilitates the construction of massive concurrent distributed systems, e.g. cloud applications. However, building an efficient actor system is a challenging task. In particular, the concurrency granularity has a critical impact on the performance of actor systems. Moreover, the best granularity depends on both the available hardware and the characteristics of the workload. This paper proposes a new actor system, ElasticActor, that automatically adjusts the granularity of parallel execution. In ElasticActor, all actors are assigned to a number of actor stations. Actors in the same station share a mailbox and constitute the minimum scheduling unit. Therefore, the runtime system can adjust the granularity by changing the number of actor stations in the system. More specifically, we model the average latency and derive a closed-form formula to compute the best number of stations. The experimental results show that ElasticActor outperforms two state-of-the-art actor systems, CAF and Orleans. It gains up to 1.3\(\times \) throughput and decreases the average latency by 0.75\(\times \) thanks to the granularity adjustment.

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Notes

  1. The testing platform is described in Sect. 5.

  2. Similar phenomenon is observed in CAF. The average latency with default granularity is 1.54\(\times \) longer than the one with the optimal granularity.

  3. The implementation of CAF is very efficient, and it outperforms many other actor systems such as Charm++ and Akka [17].

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and valuable feedback. Special thanks to Chen Ding for his comments and suggestions which have helped the development and presentation of the paper. The research is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFB1000402), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61521092, 61802368, 61432018, 61332009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Peng Zhao, Lei Liu, Wei Cao, Xiao Dong, Jiansong Li & Xiaobing Feng

  2. School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Peng Zhao, Xiao Dong & Jiansong Li

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  1. Peng Zhao
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  2. Lei Liu
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  3. Wei Cao
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  4. Xiao Dong
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Correspondence to Peng Zhao.

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Zhao, P., Liu, L., Cao, W. et al. ElasticActor: An Actor System with Automatic Granularity Adjustment. Int J Parallel Prog 47, 520–534 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-018-0613-7

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