Cluster Programming Environments

A major issue slowing the development of cluster computers is that programs that efficiently take advantage of them are difficult to write. Cluster programming adds a whole facet to sequential programming; requiring specification of not just when an operation will run, but also where it will be ran. Communications packages such as MPI and PVM explicitly express communications between the nodes of the cluster, while object orientated schemes instead focus on transparency, freeing the programmer from explicitly describing the parallelism. There is currently a great divide between the efficiency of both schemes, with MPI/PVM systems dramatically outperforming applications based on Java. Freeing the programmer from having to explicitly include parallel primitives is enticing indeed and when combined with the interoperability and portability benefits of Java, together mean that Java will soon be a serious choice for a high performance cluster programming environment.