Lecture

Reactive Programming: Scalability

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture covers the principles of reactive programming with a focus on scalability, explaining the difference between low performance and low scalability, the replication of actors, various routing strategies like round-robin and consistent hashing, and the replication of stateful actors. It concludes by highlighting how asynchronous message passing enables vertical scalability and how location transparency enables horizontal scalability.

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Message passing

In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting infrastructure to then select and run some appropriate code. Message passing differs from conventional programming where a process, subroutine, or function is directly invoked by name. Message passing is key to some models of concurrency and object-oriented programming.

Asynchronous I/O

In computer science, asynchronous I/O (also non-sequential I/O) is a form of input/output processing that permits other processing to continue before the transmission has finished. A name used for asynchronous I/O in the Windows API is overlapped I/O. Input and output (I/O) operations on a computer can be extremely slow compared to the processing of data. An I/O device can incorporate mechanical devices that must physically move, such as a hard drive seeking a track to read or write; this is often orders of magnitude slower than the switching of electric current.

Message queue

In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. Group communication systems provide similar kinds of functionality. The message queue paradigm is a sibling of the publisher/subscriber pattern, and is typically one part of a larger message-oriented middleware system.

Message-oriented middleware

Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols. The middleware creates a distributed communications layer that insulates the application developer from the details of the various operating systems and network interfaces.

Concurrent computing

Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed concurrently—during overlapping time periods—instead of sequentially—with one completing before the next starts. This is a property of a system—whether a program, computer, or a network—where there is a separate execution point or "thread of control" for each process. A concurrent system is one where a computation can advance without waiting for all other computations to complete. Concurrent computing is a form of modular programming.

Related lectures (15)

The Actor Model: Principles of Reactive Programming

Introduces the Actor Model, explaining actors' identity, behavior, and asynchronous message passing.

The Actor Model: Principles of Reactive Programming

Covers the Actor Model, emphasizing asynchronous message passing and changing an Actor's behavior.

Parallel Computing: Principles and OpenMP

Covers the principles of parallel computing and introduces OpenMP for creating concurrent code from serial code.

Message Processing Semantics

Explores the principles of reactive programming and message processing semantics in Akka, emphasizing actor encapsulation, reliable messaging, and message delivery guarantees.

Actor Messaging Semantics