A Performance Study of Java Communication Stacks over InfiniBand and Giga-bit Ethernet

With the popularity of Java programming language and the progress on Java compiler techniques, people have been trying to use Java to develop applications where C/C++ ruled before. However, to deliver comparable overall run-time performance with C/C++, Java I/O must also keep up with that of C/C++. In this paper, we studied comprehensively the performances of Java communication stacks over InfiniBand and giga-bit Ethernet, and compared them with those of benchmarks written in C. We found the network performance of current version of Sun Java run-time could be parallel with C over giga-bit Ethernet. But for higher performance InfiniBand network, the current communication stacks, mainly the TCP/IP emulation layers, showed rather poor performances. It can be concluded it's necessary to invent new approach to support InfiniBand in Java applications.