Design of concurrent utilities in Jackal: A software DSM implementation

Abstract

A Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) system logically implements the shared-memory model on a physically distributed-memory system. Jackal is an open source [2] fine grained distributed shared memory implementation of the Java programming language. Java inherently supports parallel programming with the use of multi-threading. Jackal exploits this property and allows users to run multi-threaded programs unmodified on a distributed memory environment such as a cluster. Since the built-in language support for threads is insufficient for many programming tasks, Java-1.5 introduces concurrent utilities [4]. Concurrent utilities of Java are classes that are designed as building blocks in making concurrent classes or applications. These utilities provide reduce programming effort, increase performance, increase reliability, improve maintainability and increase productivity. In this work we implement a subset of these utilities in Jackal. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.