Scaling the Distributed Actor Runtime - PARTISAN

Explore the design and implementation of PARTISAN, an alternative runtime system for distributed actor applications, in this conference talk from USENIX ATC '19. Delve into how PARTISAN improves scalability and reduces latency through dynamic overlay selection, named channels, and affinitized parallelism. Learn about the limitations of current distributed actor systems and how PARTISAN addresses these issues. Examine experimental results demonstrating significant improvements in scalability, throughput, and latency compared to Distributed Erlang. Gain insights into the potential impact of PARTISAN on distributed systems development and performance optimization.

Intro
Distributed Actors
Programming Model
Executive Summary We're going to look at how we can improve distributed actor
Limitations: Scalability
Limitations: Latency
Partisan
Dynamic Overlay Selection
Named Channels
Affinitized Parallelism
Experiments
Evaluating Scalability Distributed advertisement counter
Increasing Scalability
Reducing Latency: Microbenchmarks
Increasing Throughput: Echo Service
Increasing Throughput: KVS Service
Takeaways Distributed actor systems limited by implementation assumptions
Questions?