JBSP: A BSP Programming Library in Java

Abstract In this paper, we introduce a Java implementation of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model. JBSP (a Java-based BSP system) uses a two-daemon architecture which makes a clear separation of the computation and communication involved in parallel programs. Java threads are used in the implementation of the JBSP system to realize user defined JBSP tasks as well as to carry out system activities. The JBSP library provides programmers with both explicit message-passing and remote memory access communication methods. In addition, a set of benchmark experiments was also carried out to compare the performance of JBSP with that of BSPlib. Results show that there is considerable overhead in communications in the current implementation of JBSP due to the use of Java's Object Serialization. It was also found that although BSPlib outperforms JBSP in all the cases, JBSP is more scalable in terms of the BSP machine-parameters.