jMigBSP: Object Migration and Asynchronous One-Sided Communication for BSP Applications

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale for developing jMigBSP - a Java programming library that offers object rescheduling. It was designed to work on grid computing environments and offers an interface that follows the BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) style. jMigBSP's main contribution focuses on the rescheduling facility in two different ways: (i) by using migration directives on the application code directly and (ii) through automatic load balancing at middleware level. Especially, this second idea is feasible thanks to the Java's inheritance feature, in which transforms a simple jMigBSP application in a migratable one only by changing a single line of code. In addition, the presented library makes the object interaction easier by providing one-sided message passing directives and hides network latency through asynchronous communications. Finally, a BSP-based FFT application was developed and its execution shows jMigBSP as a competitive library when comparing performance with a C-based library called BSPlib. Besides its user-friendly Java interface, the strengths of jMigBSP also considers the migration tests where it outperforms the time spent with BSPlib.