A Study of Java Networking Performance on a Linux Cluster

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) provides a common high-level Application Programming Interface (API) to implement parallel programs on commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) clusters. Recently, increasing attention has been shown in using Java-based MPI implementations. The reason for this growing interest is that the Java language offers a potentially machine-independent method of distributing the same code to perform computation on heterogeneous computer platforms. However, the communication between parallel Java programs is a critical issue for these types of application. Consequently, the Java communication performance issues must be addressed in order to provide an efficient Java based message-passing system. This paper focuses on the communication performance of Java and evaluates its at the lower-levels. We emphasize both methodology and evaluation guidelines in order to ensure reproducibility and consistent interpretations. Additionally, we also consider tuning the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to improve the communication performance.