Scalable Java Communication Middleware for Hybrid Shared/Distributed Memory Architectures

The up trend in the number of cores in cluster architectures underscores the need for scalable communication middleware on these systems. One of the strategies to take advantage of this increase in the available computational power is the use of efficient message-passing middleware for inter-node communications and thread-based shared memory transfers within each node. This paper presents a Java communication middleware that exploits hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures through the use of scalable Java NIO sockets for inter-node communications and multi-threading on shared memory. Thus, communication-intensive applications running on clusters of multi-core processors can take advantage of the use of this middleware. The performance of these codes generally relies on collective operations, such as broadcasting, scattering or gathering data, which have been optimized to make the most of these architectures. The evaluation of this middleware when relying on multi-core aware communication patterns has shown significant performance improvements both in collective operations and communication-intensive applications.