Distributed computing using Java: A comparison of two server designs

This paper proposes a new concurrent data structure, called parallel hash table, for synchronizing the access of multiple threads to resources stored in a shared buffer. We prove theoretically the complexity of the operations and the upper limit on the thread conflict probability of the parallel hash table. To empirically evaluate the proposed concurrent data structure, we compare the performance of a TCP multi-threaded parallel hash table-based server to a conventional TCP multi-threaded shared buffer-based server implemented in Java. The experimental results on a network of 36 workstations running Windows NT, demonstrate that the parallel hash table-based server outperforms the conventional multi-threaded server. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.