Jicos: A Java-Centric Network Computing Service

Peter Cappello and Christopher James Coakley
17th IASTED Int. Conf. on Parallel and Distributed Computation and Systems,2005

Abstract

Jicos is a Java-centric distributed service for high-performance parallel computing. Its API is especially suited to divide-and-conquer computations. Computational tasks can access a global read-only input object and a mutable object that is shared asynchronously. These features enable an elegant expression of branch-and-bound optimization, which is used as the benchmark for the performance experiments. The API includes a simple set of application-controlled directives for improving performance by reducing communication latency or overlapping it with task execution. The architecture manages a host processor set that can change during the program execution for reasons that include faulty hosts. Preliminary experimental results confirm high parallel efficiency on branch-and-bound. Experiments also confirm efficient recovery from host failures. Jicos reports a computation's actual critical path time, which can be used to calculate the maximum available parallelism of a problem instance.

BibTex

@inproceedings{cappello:2005:pdcs,
    author    = {Peter Cappello and Christopher James Coakley},
    title     = {{Jicos: A Java-Centric Networking Computing Service}},
    booktitle = {Proc. 17th IASTED Int. Conf. Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems},
    year      = {2005},
    editor    = {S.Q. Zheng},
    pages     = {510 - 515},
    month     = {Nov.}
}

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