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

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.