A High Performance Java Middleware with a Real Application

ABSTRACT

Previous experiments with high-performance Java were initially disappointing. After several years of optimization, this paper investigates the current suitability of such object-oriented middleware for High-Performance and Grid programming. Using a middleware offering high level abstractions (ProActive), we have replaced the standard Java RMI layer with the optimized Ibis RMI interface. Ibis is a grid programming environment featuring efficient communications. Using a 3D electromagnetic application (an object-oriented time domain finite volume solver for 3D Maxwell equations) we have first conducted benchmarks on single clusters, including comparisons with the same application in Fortran MPI. Finally, Grid experiments have been conducted simultaneously on up to 5 different clusters. Overall, the paper reports extremely promising results. For instance, a speed up of 12 on 16 machines (vs. 13.8 for Fortran), a speedup of 100 on 150 machines on a Grid.

REFERENCES

• 1: Laurent Baduel , Francoise Baude , Denis Caromel, Efficient, flexible, and typed group communications in Java, Proceedings of the 2002 joint ACM-ISCOPE conference on Java Grande, p.28-36, November 03-05, 2002, Seattle, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/583810.583814]
• 2: [2] L. Baduel, F. Baude, D. Caromel, C. Delbe, S. El Kasmi, N. Gama, and S. Lanteri. A parallel object-oriented application for 3D electromagnetism. In Proceedings of the 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2004.
• 3: [3] M. Baker, B. Carpenter, S. Ko, and X. Li. mpijava: A java interface to mpi. Presented at First UK Workshop on Java for High Performance Network Computing, Europar, 1998.
• 4: Françoise Baude , Denis Caromel , Fabrice Huet , Lionel Mestre , Julien Vayssière, Interactive and Descriptor-Based Deployment of Object-Oriented Grid Applications, Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, p.93, July 24-26, 2002
• 5: J. M. Bull , L. A. Smith , L. Pottage , R. Freeman, Benchmarking Java against C and Fortran for scientific applications, Proceedings of the 2001 joint ACM-ISCOPE conference on Java Grande, p.97-105, June 2001, Palo Alto, California, United States [doi>10.1145/376656.376823]
• 6: Denis Caromel, Toward a method of object-oriented concurrent programming, Communications of the ACM, v.36 n.9, p.90-102, Sept. 1993 [doi>10.1145/162685.162711]
• 7: [7] I. Foster and C. Kesselman. Globus: A metacomputing infrastructure toolkit. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Environments and Tools for Parallel Scientific Computing, SIAM, Lyon, France, August 1996.
• 8: [8] Ian Foster. What is the grid? a three point checklist. GridToday, July 2002.
• 9: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 10: Vladimir Getov , Paul Gray , Vaidy Sunderam, MPI and Java-MPI: contrasts and comparisons of low-level communication performance, Proceedings of the 1999 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (CDROM), p.21-es, November 14-19, 1999, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/331532.331553]
• 11: [11] Jason Maassen, Thilo Kielmann, and Henri E. Bal. GMI: Flexible and efficient group method invocation for parallel programming. LCR '02: Sixth Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Run-time Systems for Scalable Computer, 2002.
• 12: [12] C. Nester, M. Philippsen, and B. Haumacher. A more efficient RMI for java. Concurrent: Practrice and Experience, 12(7):495-518, 2000.
• 13: [13] M. Philippsen and M. Zenger. JavaParty: Transparent remote objects in Java. Concurrency: Practice and Experience, 9(11):1225-1242, November 1997.
• 14: Serge Piperno , Malika Remaki , Loula Fezoui, A Nondiffusive Finite Volume Scheme for the Three-Dimensional Maxwell's Equations on Unstructured Meshes, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, v.39 n.6, p.2089-2108, 2001 [doi>10.1137/S0036142901387683]
• 15: H. De Sterck , R. S. Markel , T. Phol , U. Rüde, A lightweight Java taskspaces framework for scientific computing on computational grids, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 09-12, 2003, Melbourne, Florida [doi>10.1145/952532.952733]
• 16: Rob V. van Nieuwpoort , Jason Maassen , Gosia Wrzesińska , Rutger F. H. Hofman , Ceriel J. H. Jacobs , Thilo Kielmann , Henri E. Bal, Ibis: a flexible and efficient Java-based Grid programming environment: Research Articles, Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience, v.17 n.7-8, p.1079-1107, June 2005 [doi>10.1002/cpe.v17:7/8]
• 17: [17] Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Gosia Wrzesinska, Thilo Kielmann, and Henri E. Bal. Satin: Simple and efficient java-based grid programming. Accepted for publication in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices, 2004.