Pure Java Implementation of BSP

With the wide acceptance of the computing concept of cluster-based or cluster-of-clusters computing, network-based high performance computing is gaining increasing popularity among parallel computing community. Current parallel environments such as MPI (Message Passing Interface) or BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) can not apply readily to heterogeneous computing platform. In order to exploit the maximum performance potential that a heterogeneous environment brings, we have made some experiments on implementing BSP in pure Java, a fully platform-independent language. The experimental results show that implementation of parallel libraries in Java is feasible and the performance is moderately acceptable. The paper describes our experiences in implementation of BSP in pure Java. Implementation and efficiency issues such as data transport, network communication, support thread, barrier synchronization and dynamic class loading mechanism are discussed in detail.