Wide-area parallel programming using the remote method invocation model

Java's support for parallel and distributed processing makes the language attractive for metacomputing applications, such as parallel applications that run on geographically distributed (wide-area) systems. To obtain actual experience with a Java-centric approach to metacomputing, we have built and used a high-performance wide-area Java system, called Manta. Manta implements the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) model using different communication protocols (active messages and TCP/IP) for different networks. The paper shows how wide-area parallel applications can be expressed and optimized using Java RMI. Also, it presents performance results of several applications on a wide-area system consisting of four Myrinet-based clusters connected by ATM WANs. We finally discuss alternative programming models, namely object replication, JavaSpaces, and MPI for Java.