Java RMI Performance and Object Model Interoperability: Experiments with Java/HPC++ Distributed Components

Java RMI provides an elegant and powerful model for invoking member functions on objects that exist in remote address spaces. Unfortunately, it is a Java-to-Java communication model and many of the objects we would like java to interact with may be scientiic application written in C++ or Fortran. This paper explores the design of RMI and extracts a subset of the RMI object model that is compatible with C++ and HPC++ remote object semantics. This RMI-subset has been implemented to run over the Nexus runtime system and is being used as part of the LSA distributed linear system analyzer project.