JaMes: A Java-based system for Navigational Programming

Navigational Programming (NavP) is a new approach to distributed programming based on migrating threads. Under this model of computation, an application is structured as a collection of processes, which can migrate autonomously through an application-specific network of nodes. Navigational Programming has been demonstrated to have significant advantages over other programming paradigms including message passing (MP) and distributed shared memory (DSM), for general-purpose computing. JaMes is a superset of Java, in that it provides a collection of methods that implement the navigational programming model. In addition to the basic capabilities of migration and non-preemptive scheduling, JaMes extends the basic model by permitting processes to specify a priority during migration, and by allowing processes to collaborate both locally, through standard synchronization primitives, and remotely, by two different forms of send and receive operations. We illustrate the capabilities of JaMes using two representative programming examples, each chosen to illustrate a specific feature of JaMes. We also describe the performance of the chosen examples when executed under JaMes on a network of PCs.