Aspects of portability and distributed execution for JNI-wrapped message passing libraries

This paper discusses an approach which aims to provide legacy message passi ng libraries with Java-like portability in a heterogeneous, metacomputing e nvironment, The results of such portability permit distributed computing co mponents to be 'soft loaded' or 'soft-installed' in a dynamic fashion, onto cooperating resources for concurrent, synchronized parallel execution. Thi s capability provides researchers with the ability to tap into a much large r resource pool and to utilize highly tuned codes for achieving performance , Necessarily, the Java programming language is a significant component. Th e Java Native Interface (JNI) is used to wrap message passing libraries wri tten in other languages, and the bytecode which is generated for the front- end may be analyzed in order to completely determine the needs of the code which it wraps, This characterization allows the pre-configuration of a rem ote environment so as to be able to support execution. The usefulness of th e portability gained by our approach is illustrated through examples showin g the soft-installation of a process using an MPI computational substrate a nd the soft-installation of a process which requires a C-based communicatio n library based upon the efficient multi-cast communication package, CCTL, The examples show that significant gains in performance can be achieved whi le allowing message passing execution to still, exhibit high levels of port ability. Copyright (C) 2000 John Whey & Sons, Ltd.