Performance and Portability of the SciBy Virtual Machine

Abstract

The Scientific Bytecode Virtual Machine is a virtual machine designed specifically for performance, security, and portability of scientific applications deployed in a Grid environment. The performance overhead normally incurred by virtual machines is mitigated using native optimized scientific libraries, security is obtained by sandboxing techniques. Lastly, by executing platform-independent bytecodes, the machine is highly portable. To evaluate the machine, we demonstrate several use-case scenarios from some of the intended application domains. Further, we show the ease of porting the machine and distributing its jobs to a variety of predominant architectures and compare the results with native execution.