Object serialization for marshaling data in a Java interface to MPI
Bryan Carpenter, Geoffrey Fox, Sung Hoon Ko, Sang Boem Lim · Concurrency Practice and Experience · 2000
Several Java bindings to Message Passing Interface (MPI) software have been developed recently. Message buffers have usually been restricted to arrays with elements of primitive type. We discuss adoption of the Java object serialization model for marshaling general communication data in MPI-like APIs. This approach is compared with a Java transcription of the standard MPI derived datatype mechanism. We describe an implementation of the mpiJava interface to MPI that incorporates automatic object serialization. Benchmark results confirm that current JDK implementations of serialization are not fast enough for high performance messaging applications. Means of solving this problem are discussed, and benchmarks for greatly improved schemes are presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.