SymWorkManager: A Novel HPC Multi-Thread Programming Model

Multi-thread is a mature and widely-used programming mode for multitasking applications developing, especially in Java. However java.lang.Thread is not designed for HPC parallel programming. Java multi-thread program is confined within single compute host. CommonJ Work Manager is a joint specification proposed by IBM and BEA. Work Manager is a higher-level alternative to using Java Thread. Originally, Work Manager is used to solve the constraint of opening independent threads in J2EE container. Although there are some enterprise servers such as WebLogic and WebSphere which have supported Work Manager, they are not aim at large scale parallel applications. They do not have a grid-enabled and expandable architecture, and the multi-thread programs are still executed on single compute host. Currently, grid-enabled parallel programming model like MPICH-G2 is limited with C/C++ implementations. There are no official bindings for MPI with Java. In this paper, we present a grid-enabled multi-thread programming model: SymWorkManager to enable multithread programs to run on distributed environments. SymWorkManager is designed as a high performance computing (HPC) implementation of CommonJ Work Manger specification using Platform Symphony. It provides J2EE developers a simpler way to program parallel multi-thread applications under a HPC platform.