AErlang: Empowering erlang with attribute-based communication

Abstract

Attribute-based communication provides a novel mechanism to dynamically select groups of communicating entities by relying on predicates over their exposed attributes. In this paper, we embed the basic primitives for attribute-based communication into the functional concurrent language Erlang to obtain what we call AErlang, for attribute Erlang. To evaluate our prototype in terms of performance overhead and scalability we consider solutions of the Stable Marriage Problem based on predicates over attributes and on the classical preference lists, and use them to compare the runtime performance of AErlang with those of Erlang and X10. The outcome of the comparison shows that the overhead introduced by the new communication primitives is acceptable, and our prototype can compete performance-wise with an ad-hoc parallel solution in X10.