Aspects of Portability and Distributed Execution for JNI-Wrapped Message Passing Libraries

This paper discusses an approach which aims to provide legacy message passing libraries with Java-like portability in a heterogeneous, metacomputing environment. The results of such portability permits distributed computing components to be \soft-loaded," or \soft-installed" in a dynamic fashion, onto cooperating resources for concurrent, synchronized parallel execution. This capability provides researchers with the ability to tap into a much larger resource pool and to utilize highlytuned codes for achieving performance. Necessarily, the Java programming language is a signicant component. The Java Native Interface (JNI) is used to wrap message passing libraries written in other languages and the bytecode which is generated for the front-end may be analyzed in order to completely determine the needs of the code which it wraps. This characterization allows the precon guration of a remote environment so as to be able to support execution. The usefulness of the portability gain..