Ibis: a Java-centric programming environment for computational grids

Ibis [vNMH+02] is a Java-centric Grid programming environment for distributed super-computing applications. Java’s high portability allows parallel applications to run on a heterogeneous grid without requiring porting or recompilation. A major problem in using Java for high-performance computing, however, is the inferior performance and limited expressiveness of Java’s Remote Method Invocation (RMI). Earlier projects (e.g., Manta [MvNV+01]) solved the performance problem, but at the cost of using a runtime system written in native code, which gives up Java’s high portability. The philosophy behind Ibis is to try to obtain good performance without using any native code, but allow native so-lutions as special-case optimizations. The pure-Java implementation of Ibis does several optimizations (e.g., compile-time serialization generation) using bytecode rewriting. The special-case implementations do more aggressive optimizations, even allowing zero-copy communication in certain cases. The Ibis programming environment consists of a communication runtime system with a well-defined interface and a range of communication paradigms implemented on top of this interface, including RMI, object replication, group communication, and collectiv