DHPC Adelaide

DHPC Technical Report DHPC-082

Development Routes for Message Passing Parallelism in Java

J.A.Mathew, H.A.James and K.A.Hawick

Archived: 17 January 2000

Published in Proc. of the ACM Java Grande 2000 Conference, San Francisco, June 2000.

Abstract

Java is an attractive environment for writing portable message passing paralle programs. Considerable work in message passing interface bindings for the C and Fortran languages has been done. We show how this work can be reused and bindings for Java developed. We have built a Pure Java Message Passing Implementation (PJMPI) that is strongly compatible with the MPI standard. Conversely, the imperative programing style bindings are not entirely appropriate for the Java programming style and we have therefore also developed a less compatible system, known as JUMP, that enables many of the message passing parallel technological ideas but in a way that we believe will be more appropriate to the style of Java programs. JUMP is also intended as a development platform for many of our higher level ideas in parallel programming and parallel paradigms that MPI enables but does not directly implement. We review ongoing attempts at resolving this present crisis in reconciling Java and MPI. Our PJMPI system uses either Java RMI or Sockets for initialisation subsequently uses Java sockets for message passing communications. We have looked at some of the more advanced Java technologies, specifically Jini and JavaSpaces, which may contribute to Java message passing, but have found the performance of these to be somewhat deficient at the time of writing. We have therefore designed JUMP to be independent of Jini and JavaSpaces at present although use of these technologies may be strongly desirable. We describe the ClassLoading problem and other techniques we have employed in JUMP to enable a pure Java message passing system suitable for use on local and remote clusters amongst other parallel computing platforms.

Keywords: Java, Java Grande, message passing, PJMPI, JUMP, Jini, JavaSpaces.

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