Kilim: An Actor Framework for Servers

Servers are always part of a distributed ecosystem. Less focus is given to the fact that servers are also deployed on internally distributed hardware, namely multicore/ multiprocessor machines. Shared-memory concurrency -- the current approach -- is extremely error-prone and unmaintainable. One alternative is to program with communicating actors, which are active objects with a private heap and thread of their own; they do not share memory and communicate and synchronize only by passing messages.

My research has focussed on making actor-oriented programming viable and performance-competitive in extreme server environments such as Amazon.com or financial systems. The solution is part of the Kilim framework (http://kilim.malhar.net). We find it to be much faster and scalable than existing best-of-industry approaches; we will look at the Jetty web server and the Berkeley DB database, and compare them to Kilim variants.

The talk will provide an overview of two aspects of my research: an annotation-based type system to control pointer aliasing (to obtain isolation and for zero-copy messaging), and a continuation-passing style transformation of Java bytecode to obtain ultra-lightweight threads (can have hundreds of thousands of threads).

Bio: Sriram Srinivasan has been designing and delivering systems for the past 22 years. He has worked on high-performance transactional systems, CORBA and EJB frameworks, flight planning systems and communication protocols, to name a few. He was one of the primary designers and engineers of the Weblogic Application server. He recently took a detour via the University of Cambridge for a PhD in computer science.