Subject: paper referee From: Marco Danelutto Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 11:32:07 +0100 To: fox@csit.fsu.edu, Marco Vanneschi CC: Marco Danelutto Dear Professor, Marco Vanneschi gave me the Java for HPC paper to referee. I completed the referee and I send as an attachment the referee form for the paper. Please don't esitate to contact me in case of problems. Best regards marcod -- Prof. Marco Danelutto - Dipartimento di Informatica - Corso Italia, 40 - I-56125 PISA - Italy - Phone:+39.050.221.2742 Fax: +39.050.221.2726 - Email: marcod@di.unipi.it ATTENTION! Phone numbers changes on 8 feb 2001 !!!!!!!!!!! ---------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Request to review a paper C497 > Thank you for volunteering! > > I thought you might be able to provide me a referee report by March 31 2001 on the paper > C497: Java for High-Performance Computing by M. Lobosco, C. Amorim, and O. Loques > The full text of this paper can be found at > http://aspen.csit.fsu.edu/CCPEwebresource/C497loques/JavaHighPerformanceComp uting.pdf > > I am switching the journal to completely electronic form and hope you could email > me a report. Please send a short email if you can or cannot do this > > Please do this in "free form" mentioning paper metadata above > Alternatively use form appended. > Note you can find the form and some other information at: > http://aspen.csit.fsu.edu/CandCPandE/index.html > > Thank you > Geoffrey > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - > > CandC:PandE Referee Report Form -- Electronic Transimission to > fox@csit.fsu.edu strongly preferred > Referees Web Page: http://aspen.csit.fsu.edu/CandCPandE/ > Email fox@csit.fsu.edu for URL of full paper to be reviewed > > WILEY Journal Home Page > http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jtoc?ID=5361 > > John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. > Baffins Lane, Chichester > West Sussex, PO19 1UD, England > Telephone: (01243) 779777 > Fax: (01243) 770379 > > REFEREE'S REPORT > > Concurrency and Computation:Practice and Experience > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------- - > > A: General Information > > Please return to: > Geoffrey C. Fox > Electronically Preferred fox@csit.fsu.edu > Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience > Computational Science and Information Technology > Florida State University > 400 Dirac Science Library > Tallahassee Florida 32306-4130 > Office FAX 850-644-0098 > Office Phone 850-644-4587 but best is cell phone 3152546387 > > Please fill in Summary Conclusions (Sec. C) and details as appropriate in > Secs. D, E and F. > > B: Refereeing Philosophy > > We encourage a broad range of readers and contributors. Please judge papers > on their technical merit and separate comments on this from those on style > and approach. Keep in mind the strong practical orientation that we are > trying to give the journal. Note that the forms attached provide separate > paper for comments that you wish only the editor to see and those that both > the editor and author receive. Your identity will of course not be revealed > to the author. > > C: Paper and Referee Metadata > > * Paper Number Cnnn: C497 > > * Date: 03/14/2001 > > * Paper Title: Java for High Performance Computing > > * Author(s): M. Lobosco and C. Amorin and O. Loques > > * Referee: M. Danelutto > > * Address: Dept. Computer Science - Univ. Pisa - PISA - Italy marcod@di.unipi.it > > Referee Recommendations. Please indicate overall recommendations here, and > details in following sections. > > 1. publish as is > ***--> 2. accepted provided changes suggested are made > 3. reject > > D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only) > > E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) > The paper describes some programming environments based on Java that are claimed to be suitable for High Performance Computing. The programming environments reviewed comprehend Java extensions as well as JVM extensions plus some libraries that provide suitable mechanisms for high performance computing. The paper has to be intended as a quite complete "survey" paper. The paper is well written, especially the sections covering the different programming environments. However, I suggest that both the introduction and the conclusions should be modified. In particular, both sections must discuss more clearly which are the features that an high performance programming environment should present in relation to the features sported by the environments discussed. Possibly, the programming environments derived from the design pattern framework (e.g. the work of Schaeffer's group at Alberta http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~stevem/papers/IEEECON99.ps.gz) should be also taken into account as well as some other environments (e.g. JCSP, from Kent University) that have been explicitly designed for teaching but also contain features that can be easily adapted to high performance computing. > F: Presentation Changes - Can you outline, in the Introduction, which are the parameters of interest for "high performance computing" too? (parallel activity decomposition, communication/data sharing, scheduling, load balancing, etc.). In the discussion relative to the different environments presented such features should be taken into account. - there are (in the different sections of introduction) some (quite naif) statements that should be better qualified, e.g. "Java is a subset of C++" (Yes, ok, but the design of the language is far more clear than the one of C++, isn't it?), "portability is very convenient for applications that should run on heterogeneous network" (ok, but what about performance ? it's the main issue in HPC), "Java already provides a native parallel programming model" (true, but usually it is intended as a "concurrent" programming model. If you don't have SMPs, parallelism is implemented by interleaving ... which is not HPC), "methods for suspending, stopping continuing the execution of a thread ...." (such methods are deprecated, it's worthwhile point out that only "structured" synchronization is left outside deprecated methods), "Java offers a rich set of tools and APIs for communication" (again, this is true w.r.t. traditional languages, but there are other models for communication that are not taken into account by plain Java. In pure Java you have no way to perform interprocess communication explicitly naming partner processes and using channels, for instance, as in the CSP model). - the presentation of the different environments is good. At the end of the survey, in the Classification section you should point out how the mechanisms made available by the reviewed environments can be used to program typical HPC applications. How can I use enhanced RMIs to program an HPC master/slave application? How can I exploit the mechanisms shown to implement data parallel applications? etc. - last but not least, although the available performance data are quite poor, you should discuss which environments looks like to be more promising in terms of performance, especially when used to implement large HPC applications (i.e. applications requiring a large number of PEs to be used) + Some typos: on page 42 "for dealing with of" -> for dealing with on page 39 "Myrinet in Manta x Fast Ethernet" x? on page 39 "alsoshow" -> also show on page 9 , in the listing "if (index ? 0 { // not yet tripped" ?