Subject: C468: cJVM: A Cluster JVM Architecture for Single System Image Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 17:03:05 -0400 From: Geoffrey Fox Organization: Florida State University To: Avi Teperman BCC: fox@csit.fsu.edu Dear Avi, I append a referee report on your excellent paper C468: cJVM: A Cluster JVM Architecture for Single System Image I would be happy to publish your paper if you addressed the changes suggested by the referees. This looks really easy! Please include a discussion of your changes and their answer to the referees in your resubmittal. I am sure that we can publish your paper without further refereeing. I thank you for your interest in Concurrency.Practice and Experience. Send us other good papers! Please send all communication -- including the resubmission -- electronically if possible using the address fox@csit.fsu.edu If you should need a "real address", please use: Geoffrey Fox Computational Science and Information Technology Florida State University 400 Dirac Science Library Tallahassee Florida 32306-4130 850-644-4587 but easiest is cell phone 3152546387 Referee Report -------------- This is an excellent and very interesting paper. Most of my comments address presentation and grammar. General Comments: 1. Expand JVM one at the beginning of the paper and then use JVM throughout. 2. Expand SSI one at the beginning of the paper and then use SSI throughout. 3. Change all references to Chapters in the paper to Sections. 4. The reference to super-linear speedup in my opinion less than helpful (Page 20) as your text implies that you run the embarrassingly parallel application with X threads on a single machine and then run the run the same application with X threads on small cluster. A more realistic test would have been to run Y threads on a single machine and NxY threads on N machines. Particular comments: 1. Change Summary title to Abstract. 2. Abstract, paragraph 2, what is 10Kloc? 3. Abstract, last sentence, change "… how we aim at obtaining scalability." to "… how we aim to obtain scalability." 4. Page 2, last paragraph, change "we enable exploiting opportunities for optimizations" to "we provide optimization opportunities" 5. Page 3, change sub-section title to "The Java Virtual Machine" 6. Page 4, section memory model, paragraph 1, should "integral" actually be "integer"? 7. Figure 2 - this sketch is small and very confusing. I suggest it is broken into two figures, with a caption describing the basics of each. 8. Page 6, paragraph 1, The wording "application which are concurrent daemons" is confusing and probably incorrect terminology. 9. Page 6, last two paragraphs, the description here for Figure 2 is confusing to say the least. 10. Page 7, object model sub-section, list "key challenges" 11. Page 7, object model sub-section, change "in the next chapter." To "in section X." 12. Page 7, Thread sub-section, change wording, "To enable a scalability gain," to "to provide scalability," 13. Page 8, Means to Achieve Scalability sub-section, remove "high" from "to obtain high scalability" 14. Page 8, Means to Achieve Scalability sub-section, paragraph 2, list different approaches. 15. Page 10, first paragraph, change "BACKGROUND Chapter" to "Background Section" 16. Page 12, second last paragraph, add "a" into sentence "if such a method is" 17. Page 12, last paragraph, two lots of "For example"… Looks odd and should be changed. 18. Page 14, thread creation sub-section, first paragraph, "subclass" should be hyphenated "sub-class" 19. Page 14, thread creation sub-section, first paragraph, the comment "(see below)" should be changed to be explicit, i.e. "(see Fig X)" or "(see sub-section y". 20. Figure 8, the legend of dashes/dots does not appear to correspond to the dot/dashes in the figure. RMI and Proxy Master Relation in the legend appear the same! 21. Page 18, footnote 12, typo, change "acquired" to "acquires" 22. Page 19, add space between "translate" and "(GA)" 23. Page 20, citation needed pBOB. 24. Page 22, reference 1 need a URL or more details of how to obtain the info that you refer to, i.e. UCSD Tech Doc #, etc.