M-JavaMPI: A Java-MPI Binding with Process Migration Support

Several Java bindings to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) software have been developed for high-performance parallel Java-based computing with message-passing in the past. None of them however addressed the issue of supporting transparent Java process migration for achieving dynamic load distribution and balancing. This paper presents a middleware, called M-JavaMPI, that runs on top of the standard JVM to support transparent Java process migration and communication redirection. The middleware allows Java processes to freely and transparently migrate between machines to achieve load balancing, and migrated processes can continue communication with other processes using MPI. The method we use to achieve process migration is to capture execution context and restoring the execution context at the Java bytecode level using the Java Virtual Machine Debugger Interface (JVMDI). Post-migration interprocess communication is enabled via a Restorable Java-MPI API. Tests using a 16-node cluster have Shown that our mechanism yields considerable performance gain through migration.