Enabling Java mobile computing on the IBM Jikes research virtual machine

ABSTRACT

Today's complex applications must face the distribution of data and code among different network nodes. Java is a wide-spread language that allows developers to build complex software, even distributed, but it cannot handle the migration of computations (i.e. threads), due to intrinsic limitations of many traditional JVMs. After analyzing the approaches in literature, this paper presents our research work on the IBM Jikes Research Virtual Machine: exploiting some of its innovative VM techniques, we implemented an extension of its scheduler that allows applications to easily capture the state of a running thread and makes it possible to restore it elsewhere (i.e. on a different hardware or software architecture, but still with a version of JikesRVM installed). Our thread serialization mechanism provides support for both proactive and reactive migration of single- and multi-threaded Java applications. With respect to previous approaches, we implemented the mobility framework without recompiling a previous JVM source code, but simply extending its functionalities with a full Java package.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bowen Alpern , C. R. Attanasio , Anthony Cocchi , Derek Lieber , Stephen Smith , Ton Ngo , John J. Barton , Susan Flynn Hummel , Janice C. Sheperd , Mark Mergen, Implementing jalapeño in Java, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.314-324, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 2: B. Alpern , C. R. Attanasio , J. J. Barton , M. G. Burke , P. Cheng , J.-D. Choi , A. Cocchi , S. J. Fink , D. Grove , M. Hind , S. F. Hummel , D. Lieber , V. Litvinov , M. F. Mergen , T. Ngo , J. R. Russell , V. Sarkar , M. J. Serrano , J. C. Shepherd , S. E. Smith , V. C. Sreedhar , H. Srinivasan , J. Whaley, The Jalapeño virtual machine, IBM Systems Journal, v.39 n.1, p.211-238, January 2000
• 3: Matthew Arnold , Stephen Fink , David Grove , Michael Hind , Peter F. Sweeney, Adaptive optimization in the Jalapeño JVM, Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.47-65, October 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 4: Anand Balachandran , Geoffrey M. Voelker , Paramvir Bahl, Wireless hotspots: current challenges and future directions, Mobile Networks and Applications, v.10 n.3, p.265-274, June 2005 [doi>10.1007/s11036-005-6421-5]
• 5: Sara Bouchenak , Daniel Hagimont, Pickling Threads State in the Java System, Proceedings of the Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems (TOOLS 33), p.22, June 05-08, 2000
• 6: S. Bouchenak, D. Hagimont, S. Krakowiak, N. De Palma and F. Boyer, Experiences Implementing Efficient Java Thread Serialization, Mobility and Persistence", I.N.R.I.A., Research report n°4662, December 2002
• 7: Michael G. Burke , Jong-Deok Choi , Stephen Fink , David Grove , Michael Hind , Vivek Sarkar , Mauricio J. Serrano , V. C. Sreedhar , Harini Srinivasan , John Whaley, The Jalapeño dynamic optimizing compiler for Java, Proceedings of the ACM 1999 conference on Java Grande, p.129-141, June 12-14, 1999, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/304065.304113]
• 8: Craig David Chambers, The design and implementation of the self compiler, an optimizing compiler for object-oriented programming languages, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1992
• 9: G. Cabri, L. Leonardi, F. Zambonelli, Weak and Strong Mobility in Mobile Agent Applications, Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application of Java (PA JAVA 2000), Manchester (UK), April 2000
• 10: Stephen J. Fink , Feng Qian, Design, implementation and evaluation of adaptive recompilation with on-stack replacement, Proceedings of the international symposium on Code generation and optimization: feedback-directed and runtime optimization, March 23-26, 2003, San Francisco, California
• 11: Alfonso Fuggetta , Gian Pietro Picco , Giovanni Vigna, Understanding Code Mobility, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.24 n.5, p.342-361, May 1998 [doi>10.1109/32.685258]
• 12: Stefan Fünfrocken, Transparent Migration of Java-Based Mobile Agents, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Mobile Agents, p.26-37, September 01, 1998
• 13: Tim Lindholm , Frank Yellin, Java Virtual Machine Specification, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 14: Torsten Illmann , Tilman Krueger , Frank Kargl , Michael Weber, Transparent Migration of Mobile Agents Using the Java Platform Debugger Architecture, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Agents, p.198-212, December 02-04, 2001
• 15: M. Kim, D. Kotz and S. Kim. Extracting a mobility model from real user traces, In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM), Barcelona, Spain, April, 2006
• 16: Scott Oaks , Henry Wong, Java Threads, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2004
• 17: The OpenMosix Project, http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
• 18: Takahiro Sakamoto , Tatsurou Sekiguchi , Akinori Yonezawa, Bytecode Transformation for Portable Thread Migration in Java, Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications and Fourth International Symposium on Mobile Agents, p.16-28, September 13-15, 2000
• 19: Tatsurou Sekiguchi , Hidehiko Masuhara , Akinori Yonezawa, A Simple Extension of Java Language for Controllable Transparent Migration and Its Portable Implementation, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Coordination Languages and Models, p.211-226, April 26-28, 1999
• 20: S. Soman, C. Krintz, Efficient, General-Purpose, On-Stack Replacement for Aggressive Program Specialization, University of California, Santa Barbara Technical Report #42004--24
• 21: Takashi Suezawa, Persistent execution state of a Java virtual machine, Proceedings of the ACM 2000 conference on Java Grande, p.160-167, June 03-04, 2000, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/337449.337536]
• 22: Anurag Acharya , M. Ranganathan , Joel H. Saltz, Sumatra: A Language for Resource-Aware Mobile Programs, Selected Presentations and Invited Papers Second International Workshop on Mobile Object Systems - Towards the Programmable Internet, p.111-130, July 08-09, 1996
• 23: N. Suri et al., An Overview of the NOMADS Mobile Agent System, Workshop On Mobile Object Systems in association with the 14th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2000), Cannes, France, 2000
• 24: Sun Microsystems. Improving Serialization Performance with Externalizable, http://java.sun.com/developer/TechTips/txtarchive/2000/Apr00_StuH.txt
• 25: Eddy Truyen , Bert Robben , Bart Vanhaute , Tim Coninx , Wouter Joosen , Pierre Verbaeten, Portable Support for Transparent Thread Migration in Java, Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications and Fourth International Symposium on Mobile Agents, p.29-43, September 13-15, 2000
• 26: X. Wang, Translation from Strong Mobility to Weak Mobility for Java, Master's thesis, The Ohio State University, 2001
• 27: Paul R. Wilson, Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Memory Management, p.1-42, September 17-19, 1992
• 28: Wenzhang Zhu , Cho-Li Wang , Francis C. M. Lau, JESSICA2: A Distributed Java Virtual Machine with Transparent Thread Migration Support, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, p.381, September 23-26, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
Java virtual machine, code mobility, distributed applications, thread persistence