Robert Macdonald Smith

Speaking Sessions

• Exploring the Actor Model with Akka.NET

  3:30 PM Saturday   Room: AF-231

  With multicore processors and distributed systems becoming the norm, we need to have the tools and techniques to write concurrent and parallel programs that are correct and easy to reason about. The Actor Model (conceived back in 1973) is a high level abstraction for writing concurrent and distributed applications. The core concept of "actors" alleviates the developer from having to deal with explicit locking and thread management, making it easier to write correct concurrent systems. Akka.NET is an implementation of the Actor Model and a port of the Akka framework, that has been around on the JVM for a few years. In this session I will give an overview of the Actor Model; what Actors are, how they interact with messages and why they are inherently good at solving concurrent programming problems. I will cover concepts such as supervision and why this provides clean semantics for fault-tolerance and leads to systems that can self heal. In the second half, I will dive in to some code to demonstrate some of these concepts in a program implemented with Akka.NET. After this session I hope that you will have good understanding of the Actor Model and why you would want use it in your concurrent, parallel and distributed systems.