Javia: A Java interface to the virtual interface architecture

The Virtual Interface (VI) architecture has become the industry standard for user-level network interfaces. This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of Javia, a Java interface to the VI architecture. Javia explores two points in the design space. The first approach manages buffers in C and requires data copies between the Java heap and native buffers. The second approach relies on a Java-level buffer abstraction that eliminates the copies in the first approach. Javia achieves an effective bandwidth of 80 Mbytes s−1 for 8 kbyte messages, which is within 1% of those achieved by C programs. Performance evaluations of parallel matrix multiplication and of the active messages communication protocol show that Javia can serve as an efficient building block for Java cluster applications. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.