Actor Model Implementation - Cosmic Cube

Cosmic Cube

The Cosmic Cube was developed by Chuck Seitz et al. at Caltech providing architectural support for Actor systems. A significant difference between the Cosmic Cube and most other parallel processors is that this multiple instruction multiple-data machine uses message passing instead of shared variables for communication between concurrent processes. This computational model is reflected in the hardware structure and operating system, and is also the explicit message passing communication seen by the programmer. According to Seitz :

It was a premise of the Cosmic Cube experiment that the internode communication should scale well to very large numbers of nodes. A direct network like the hypercube satisfies this requirement, with respect to both the aggregate bandwidth achieved across the many concurrent communication channels and the feasibility of the implementation. The hypercube is actually a distributed variant of an indirect logarithmic switching network like the Omega or banyan networks: the kind that might be used in shared-storage organizations. With the hypercube, however, communication paths traverse different numbers of channels and so exhibit different latencies. It is possible, therefore, to take advantage of communication locality in placing processes in nodes.