Parallel Java for the Hitachi SR 2201

In October of 1997, a year-long collaborative project was started between Hitachi Europe Limited (HEL) and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh. This project had the goal of producing an environment whereby Java programs may be executed on the Hitachi SR2201 distributed memory multi-processor machine. The two key deliverables from this work are a port of Sun Microsystem’s Java Virtual Machine onto the SR2201, and a set of class libraries to allow Java application programmers to portably exploit the parallelism in that machine. These class libraries were targeted towards portability between three deployment scenarios: execution on a serial or shared-memory multiprocessor, execution on a distributed memory multi-processor machine such as the SR2201, and a hybrid scheme where the SR2201 acts as an enterprise computeserver for parallel execution of tasks as requested by clients on a network. The motivation for this project and the results from the work done shall be reported in this document.