ThreadedComposite: A Mechanism for Building Concurrent and Parallel Ptolemy II Models

This paper describes the usage patterns of the ThreadedComposite actor in Ptolemy II. This actor enables the execution of opaque actors (atomic actors or composite actors with directors) in a separate thread, thus providing multithreading for models of computation that are not already multthreaded. It can be used to execute an actor in the background, to execute multiple actors in parallel (e.g. on a multicore machine), and to execute actors that block on I/O operations without blocking other actors.