Object serialization for marshaling data in a Java interface to MPI

Several Java bindings to Message Passing Interface (MPI) software have been developed recently. Message buffers have usually been restricted to arrays with elements of primitive type. We discuss adoption of the Java object se rialization model for marshaling general communication data in MPI-like API s, This approach is compared with a Java transcription of the standard MPI derived datatype mechanism. We describe an implementation of the mpiJava in terface to MPI that incorporates automatic object serialization. Benchmark results confirm that current JDK implementations of serialization are not f ast enough for high performance messaging applications. Means of solving th is problem are discussed, and benchmarks for greatly improved schemes are p resented. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.