Using mobile agents for parallel processing

Mobile code is a promising model for distributed computing and it has been exploited in several areas of applications. One of the areas that may benefit from the use of mobile agent technology is parallel processing. This paper describes a Java-based platform, called JAMES, that provides support for parallel computing. We have implemented a software module that supports the well-known model of master/worker and we have exploited the use of parallel computing in some distributed tasks. We present some experimental results that compare the master/worker model with the usual model of migratory agents. Then, we compare the use of mobile agents with two other solutions for parallel computing: MPI and JET. The results are quite promising.