Object Serialization for Marshalling Data in a Java Interface to MPI

Bryan Carpenter, Geoffrey Fox, Sung Hoon Ko and Sang Lim
NPAC at Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244
{dbc,gcf,shko,slim}@npac.syr.edu

Abstract:

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 serialization model for marshalling general communication data in MPI-like APIs. This approach is compared with a Java transcription of the standard MPI derived datatype mechanism. We describe an implementation of the mpiJava interface to MPI that incorporates automatic object serialization. Benchmark results confirm that current JDK implementations of serialization are not fast enough for high performance messaging applications. Means of solving this problem are discussed, and benchmarks for greatly improved schemes are presented.

• Introduction
  • Overview of this article.
  • Related work
• Datatypes in an MPI-like API for Java
• Adding serialization to the API
• Benchmark results for multidimensional arrays
• Reducing serialization overheads for arrays
• Discussion
• References
• About this document ...