[kepler-dev] Actor is not ready to fire messages

[Edward A. Lee]

This is actually a rather interesting research problem.
We have two major sets of (partial) results on this:

 - The behavioral interfaces that Yuhong Xiong developed
   in his PhD thesis and several papers on the Ptolemy website.
   These use interface automata to specify actor and director
   assumptions and behaviors, and formal composition to check
   compatibility. It is effectively a "behavioral type system."
   This has never really been "productized" in the Ptolemy tree.
   It's just a concept demonstration phase.

 - The Cal actor language, developed by Joern Janneck while he
   was a postdoc here. One of the main motivations of Cal was that
   actor definitions could be statically analyzed for token
   production/consumption behavior (unlike Java actors, where
   the question is actually undecidable).  This static analysis
   has never been implemented, but there would be considerable
   interest in doing so.  Cal has been adopted by MPEG as the
   specification language for all video and audio coding standards
   (!) and is also being extensively developed at Xilinx as a
   hardware design language for FPGAs.

Anybody want a PhD thesis topic?

Edward

At 11:08 AM 1/8/2008, Timothy McPhillips wrote:
>Hi Christopher,
>
>The idea of requiring that actors declare SDF-safety by implementing  
>a Java interface is interesting.  There seem to be a number of  
>related issues it'd be nice to address at some point.
>
>A general issue, it seems to me, is that it can be hard for users  
>(developers included) to know what components (actors, directors,  
>etc) can be used productively together. Knowing what actors are  
>compatible with which directors is one example of this issue.   
>Another example is that different actors may be incompatible with  
>each other due to differences in how data is managed (ports vs  
>parameters, sequences of tokens vs arrays of tokens when handling  
>variably-sized collections of data, etc).  One may find an actor that  
>sounds like it does what one desires, but due to differences in how  
>data is consumed or produced it may turn out that the actor won't  
>work with the actors (or director) one has already selected for use  
>in a workflow.   So there may be multiple dimensions in which  
>component incompatibility may arise.
>
>Examining the documentation or source code for actors can reveal why  
>certain components don't work well together, but I wonder if there  
>isn't a more general solution that makes it easy to see what actors  
>and directors are meant to work well together in the first place.
>
>What do you think?
>
>Tim
>
>On Jan 8, 2008, at 7:51 AM, Christopher Brooks wrote:
>
>> Are you using the SDF director?
>> My suggestion is to not use BooleanSwitch in SDF.
>> As to why, see Dan Higgins' explanation in
>> http://www.kepler-project.org/Wiki.jsp?page=DirectorsInKepler
>>
>> My understanding is that BooleanSwitch may be used in SDF, but only
>> under carefully controlled situations.  This issue seems to come up
>> fairly regularly with BooleanSwitch, the documentation should be more
>> clear, I'll see what I can do.  Maybe we should disable BooleanSwitch
>> under SDF, or at least have it print a message or something.  Perhaps
>> actors that are SDF safe should implement a specific interface, or
>> actors in actor/lib that are not SDF safe should implement a specific
>> interface.
>>
>> _Christopher
>>
>> --------
>>
>>     Hi,
>>
>>     I create two custom actor, one of them reads a binary file and  
>> other
>>     writes the input into a netcdf file (i also update my actors  
>> according
>>     to earlier suggestions about stopping workflow) and the workflow
>>     structure is similar to BinaryFileRead and BinaryFileWrite but  
>> in my
>>     case there is only one file which has multiple time step data.  
>> I am
>>     using Boolean Switch actor to stop my work flow but at the last
>>     iteration it gives me "Actor is not ready to fire" messages.  
>> So, I check
>>     the "end of file" port of my custom binary file reader actor using
>>     display actor and it seems ok.
>>
>>     any suggestion will be helpful,
>>
>>     best wishes
>>
>>     --ufuk
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------------ 
Edward A. Lee
Chair of EECS and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor
231 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1770
phone: 510-642-0253, fax: 510-642-2845
eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/lee.html