The past few month, I have been busy implementing a fast actor language for the JVM. The language is essentially Newspeak with a smaller class library and without proving access to the underlying platform, which can lead to violations of the language’s guarantees.
More than three years ago, Lode and I started thinking about parallel event processing for realtime systems. The main use case back then was gesture and motion detection based on cameras such as the Kinect. Thierry created the first fully functional prototype called PARTE, and in addition to his master thesis, we wrote a workshop paper about it. Now, we finally got also the revised and extended version of this paper accepted.
It has been a while since SPLASH’12, but I got finally around to put up a copy of our paper at the AGERE’12 workshop. It is based on Thierry’s master thesis and presents his work on parallelizing a Rete engine for gesture recognition. Lode and I were his advisors and are happily working with him on what we promised in the future work section.
Yesterday was the first day of Smalltalks 2012 in Puerto Madryn. The organizers invited my to give a keynote on a topic of my choice, which I gladly did. Having just handed in my thesis draft, I chose to put my research into the context of Smalltalk and try to relate it to one of the main open questions: How do we actually want to program multicore systems.
With Joeri we have been working already for a while on a paper to extend the standard actor model with more parallelism. This work is not completed yet, and there are still some theoretical issues with the approach he designed. But we are working on it!
And here we go again: SPLASH 2011 has started with its first day of workshops.
Today, I gave a talk at the ExaScience Lab, Intel Labs Europe in Leuven at IMEC. I talked mainly about the idea of nondeterministic programming, the Sly programming language and some details on our Smalltalk manycore virtual machine that enables those experiments. Thus, tried to spread the word about our Renaissance project at bit further.
The following introduction and analysis of the Sly3 programming language was written by Pablo Inostroza Valdera as part of his course work for the Multicore Programming course of Tom Van Cutsem. The assignment was to write a blog post about a topic of their own choice, and I repost Pablo’s work here with his permission to spread the word about Sly a bit wider. We made his article also available as part of his work for the Renaissance project itself.
Last Friday was the annual Lab event of our Software Languages Lab. Like last year, many people related to the lab in one or the other way came to get an overview of what the current topics of our research are.
We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.
Already quite a while ago, I was involved in writing a workshop paper about an actor model for virtual machines. Actually, the main idea was to find a concurrency model for a VM which supports multi-dimensional separation of concerns. However, AOP is not that interesting for me at the moment, so I am focussing on the concurrency, especially the actor-based VM model.