Implementation of a portable software DSM in Java

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Abstract
Rapid commoditization of advanced hardware and progress of networking technology is now making wide area high-performance computing a.k.a. the 'Grid' Computing a reality. Since a Grid will consist of vastly heterogeneous sets of compute nodes, especially commodity clusters, some have articulated the use of Java as a suitable technology to satisfy portability across different machines. Since Java's natural model parallelism is shared memory multithreading, one will have to support distributed shared memory (DSM) in a portable manner; however, none of the previous work on implementing Java on DSM has been a portable solution. Instead, we propose a software architecture whose goal is to achieve portability of DSM implementations across different commodity clustering platforms, while restricting the programming model somewhat, and implemented a prototype system, JDSM. Benchmark results show that the current implementation on Java incurs increased memory coherency maintenance cost compared to C-based DSMs, thus limiting scalability to some degree, and we are currently working on a solution to alleviate this cost.

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