| The EUML-ARC programming model shows that the increasing parallelism available on multi-core processors requires evolutionary (not revolutionary) changes in software design. The EUML-ARC programming model combines and extends software technology available even before the introduction of multi-core processors to provide software engineers with the ability to specify software systems that expose abstract platform-independent parallelism. The EUML-ARC programming model is a synthesis of Executable UML, the Actor model, role-based modeling, split objects, and aspect-based coordination. Computation in the EUML-ARC programming model is structured in terms of semantic entities composed of actor-based agents whose behaviors are expressed in hierarchical state machines. An entity is composed of a base intrinsic agent and multiple extrinsic role agents, all with dedicated conceptual threads of control. Entities interact through their role agents in the context of feature-oriented collaborations orchestrated by coordinator agents. The conceptual threads of control associated with the agents in a software system expose both intra-entity and inter-entity parallelism that is mapped by the EUML-ARC model compiler to the hardware threads available on the target multi-core processor. The hardware and software efficiency achieved with representative benchmark systems show that the EUML-ARC programming model and its compiler can exploit multi-core parallelism while providing a productive model-driven approach to software development. |
