Implementation details of ALBA in a transputer machine

Abstract ALBA, A parallel L anguage B ased on A ctors [1] is a new programming language designed to take advantage of highly parallel architectures that use message passing as the fundamental low-level interaction primitive. Essentially, an actor is a computational agent which carries out its actions in response to processing a communication [2]. The actions it may perform are: create more actors dynamically; send communications to itself or to other actors and change its behaviour dynamically. These actions are the basic minimal features of an actor system. In this paper, we describe how these features are implemented in our actor-based language, focusing in how them can be easily ported to any multiprocessor or network system. The ALBA programming language is being developed under the HELIOS operating system for a transputer machine.