MPJ: A Reference Message-Passing System for Java
Mark Baker
Java is becoming an increasingly popular language for developing
distributed and parallel scientific and engineering applications. In
this talk I sketch out a proposed reference implementation for message
passing in Java (MPJ), an MPI-like API from the Message-Passing Working
Group of the Java Grande Forum. The proposal relies heavily on RMI and
Jini for finding computational resources, creating slave processes, and
handling failures. User-level communication is implemented efficiently
directly on top of Java sockets.
In the first part of the talk I discuss MPJ, our MPI-like Java
message-passing API and the parallel environment that we wish to
support. In particular I look at aspects such as reliability and ease of
use. In the second part of the talk I move onto to sketch out the Jini
architecture. It is at this stage I review the services that Jini
provides and how these will be used to support the MPJ environment. Here
I am particularly concerned with Jinis ability to support reliably, a
cocoon of MPJ processes executing in a heterogeneous environment. In the
final part of the talk I summarise and report on work being undertaken
with MPJ and Jini.
View the slides in PDF format.
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