Wide-area parallel programming using the remote method invocation model
Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Henri E. Bal, Thilo Kielmann, Ronald Veldema · Concurrency Practice and Experience · 2000
Java's support for parallel and distributed processing makes the language attractive for metacomputing applications, such as parallel applications that run on geographically distributed (wide-area) systems. To obtain actual experience with a Java-centric approach to metacomputing, we have built and used a high-performance wide-area Java system, called Manta. Manta implements the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) model using different communication protocols (active messages and TCP/IP) for different networks. The paper shows how wide-area parallel applications can be expressed and optimized using Java RMI. Also, it presents performance results of several applications on a wide-area system consisting of four Myrinet-based clusters connected by ATM WANs. We finally discuss alternative programming models, namely object replication, JavaSpaces, and MPI for Java. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.