Monday, May 3, 2010

TBB Actor Model


I have been interested in the Actor Model for some time. I have previously written some functioning actor code, but I was a little overzealous in my application of the model, it was single threaded, and my message-passing scheme was extraordinarily slow. I have also been interested in the potential of TBB for some time. Game Programming Gems 8 has a very well written article by Robert Jay Gould about implementing the Actor Model using Intel Threading Building Blocks (http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/). Naturally, I was excited to get my hands on the project and start messing around. Unfortunately, the code associated with this article is missing off the included CD. I figured that I might be able to find it online, and in fact, I did find the project (owned by Robert Jay Gould) at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/tbb-actor/. GO figure that the project has no source files in Subversion. A bit further digging (OK, the next thing down on the Google search results) resulted in finding the following in the Intel TBB forums: http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=65100. (Associated but older links are http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=62373 and http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=61550). Some acknowledgement is given here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimizing-parallel-data-transformation/; however, it simply notes that the project is "embryonic" as of July 21st 2009. I have taken what code gleaned from the TBB forum and I am tinkering with it, but hopefully somebody (read RJG) posts the content that was supposed to be included in GPG8…

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