Faculty Advisor
Dr. K.M. George

Grant
$4,500 on 10/17/97

Project Funding
To purchase equipment, fund conference registration and travel expenses related to dissertation research to develop an agent-based massively distributed parallel processing environment.

Abstract: An Actor-Based Framework for Distributed Mobile Computation
Recently, autonomous mobile agents have begun to be recognized as a new computing paradigm for distributed systems. An autonomous mobile agent is a program that can change its behavior and migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network dynamically. In this research, we present a communication paradigm that incorporates actor-based message passing to support dynamic architecture topologies for massively distributed parallel computations. We formally define an abstraction of the actor model with the semantics of mobility and navigational autonomy. We express mobile agents as actors using mobile actor semantics. We address concurrency issues such as divergence, starvation, deadlock and mutual exclusion. Lastly, we show that our model provides a new solution to programming massively distributed parallel computations. We justify the need for this formalization providing solutions to known problems associated with mobile agents.

Current Status
Currently, we are implementing the actor semantics, as well as mobile actor semantics within the Java programming Language through an ACTOR Class library. Concurrent programs may be written using the Actor Class Methods. The library will work for a standalone system (enforcing concurrency), or on a shared memory multiprocessing system (enforcing concurrency and/or parallelism). We are currently implementing a Java based actor architecture for implementing distributed actor-based computations. Each physical machine will maintain a Run-time Manager, which will allow actor processes to migrate between machines. In particular, we extend the Java Programming Language with mobile actor semantics to support global computing. Our prototype software will be made publicly available.

Web Site
https://chester.cs.okstate.edu/blegand/dissertation.html, (This site may change.)