The nondeterministic ordering of message handling in the original actor model makes it difficult to achieve the consistency across a distributed system that some applications require. This paper explores a number of mitigations, focusing primarily on the use of logical time to define a semantic ordering for messages. A variety of coordination mechanisms can ensure that messages are handled in logical time order, but they all come with costs. A fundamental tradeoff (the CAL theorem) makes it impossible to achieve consistency without paying a price in availability, where the price depends on the latencies introduced by network communication, computation overhead, and clock synchronization error. This paper shows how to use the Lingua Franca coordination language to navigate this tradeoff, and particularly how to ensure eventual consistency while bounding unavailability with manageable risk.

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Logical Time in Actor Systems

  • Edward A. Lee

摘要

The nondeterministic ordering of message handling in the original actor model makes it difficult to achieve the consistency across a distributed system that some applications require. This paper explores a number of mitigations, focusing primarily on the use of logical time to define a semantic ordering for messages. A variety of coordination mechanisms can ensure that messages are handled in logical time order, but they all come with costs. A fundamental tradeoff (the CAL theorem) makes it impossible to achieve consistency without paying a price in availability, where the price depends on the latencies introduced by network communication, computation overhead, and clock synchronization error. This paper shows how to use the Lingua Franca coordination language to navigate this tradeoff, and particularly how to ensure eventual consistency while bounding unavailability with manageable risk.