Java RMI performance and object model interoperability: experiments with Java/HPC++

Java RMI provides an elegant and powerful model for invoking member functions on objects that exist in remote address spaces. Unfortunately, it is a Java-to-Java communication model, and in many of the scienti c applications we would like Java objects to interact with modules written in C++ or Fortran. This paper explores the design of RMI and extracts a subset of the RMI object model that is compatible with C++ and HPC++ remote object semantics. This RMI subset has been implemented to run over the Nexus runtime system and is being used as part of the LSA distributed linear system analyzer project.