Low‐latency Java communication devices on RDMA‐enabled networks

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Expósito, R. R., Taboada, G. L., Ramos, S., Touriño, J., & Doallo, R. (2015). Low‐latency Java communication devices on RDMA‐enabled networks. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 27(17), 4852-4879., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3473. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.[Abstract] Providing high‐performance inter‐node communication is a key capability for running high performance computing applications efficiently on parallel architectures. In fact, current systems deployments are aggregating a significant number of cores interconnected via advanced networking hardware with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) mechanisms, that enable zero‐copy and kernel‐bypass features. The use of Java for parallel programming is becoming more promising thanks to some useful characteristics of this language, particularly its built‐in multithreading support, portability, easy‐to‐learn properties, and high productivity, along with the continuous increase in the performance of the Java virtual machine. However, current parallel Java applications generally suffer from inefficient communication middleware, mainly based on protocols with high communication overhead that do not take full advantage of RDMA‐enabled networks. This paper presents efficient low‐level Java communication devices that overcome these constraints by fully exploiting the underlying RDMA hardware, providing low‐latency and high‐bandwidth communications for parallel Java applications. The performance evaluation conducted on representative RDMA networks and parallel systems has shown significant point‐to‐point performance increases compared with previous Java communication middleware, allowing to obtain up to 40% improvement in application‐level performance on 4096 cores of a Cray XE6 supercomputer.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TIN2013-42148-PXunta de Galicia; GRC2013/055Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia; AP2010-434

Device level communication libraries for high‐performance computing in Java

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Taboada, G. L., Touriño, J. , Doallo, R. , Shafi, A. , Baker, M. and Carpenter, B. (2011), Device level communication libraries for high‐performance computing in Java. Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper., 23: 2382-2403. doi:10.1002/cpe.1777, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1777. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.[Abstract] Since its release, the Java programming language has attracted considerable attention from the high‐performance computing (HPC) community because of its portability, high programming productivity, and built‐in multithreading and networking support. As a consequence, several initiatives have been taken to develop a high‐performance Java message‐passing library to program distributed memory architectures, such as clusters. The performance of Java message‐passing applications relies heavily on the communications performance. Thus, the design and implementation of low‐level communication devices that support message‐passing libraries is an important research issue in Java for HPC. MPJ Express is our Java message‐passing implementation for developing high‐performance parallel Java applications. Its public release currently contains three communication devices: the first one is built using the Java New Input/Output (NIO) package for the TCP/IP; the second one is specifically designed for the Myrinet Express library on Myrinet; and the third one supports thread‐based shared memory communications. Although these devices have been successfully deployed in many production environments, previous performance evaluations of MPJ Express suggest that the buffering layer, tightly coupled with these devices, incurs a certain degree of copying overhead, which represents one of the main performance penalties. This paper presents a more efficient Java message‐passing communications device, based on Java Input/Output sockets, that avoids this buffering overhead. Moreover, this device implements several strategies, both in the communication protocol and in the HPC hardware support, which optimizes Java message‐passing communications. In order to evaluate its benefits, this paper analyzes the performance of this device comparatively with other Java and native message‐passing libraries on various high‐speed networks, such as Gigabit Ethernet, Scalable Coherent Interface, Myrinet, and InfiniBand, as well as on a shared memory multicore scenario. The reported communication overhead reduction encourages the upcoming incorporation of this device in MPJ ExpressMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735

Java in the High Performance Computing arena: Research, practice and experience

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Science of Computer Programming. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2011.06.002[Abstract] The rising interest in Java for High Performance Computing (HPC) is based on the appealing features of this language for programming multi-core cluster architectures, particularly the built-in networking and multithreading support, and the continuous increase in Java Virtual Machine (JVM) performance. However, its adoption in this area is being delayed by the lack of analysis of the existing programming options in Java for HPC and thorough and up-to-date evaluations of their performance, as well as the unawareness on current research projects in this field, whose solutions are needed in order to boost the embracement of Java in HPC. This paper analyzes the current state of Java for HPC, both for shared and distributed memory programming, presents related research projects, and finally, evaluates the performance of current Java HPC solutions and research developments on two shared memory environments and two InfiniBand multi-core clusters. The main conclusions are that: (1) the significant interest in Java for HPC has led to the development of numerous projects, although usually quite modest, which may have prevented a higher development of Java in this field; (2) Java can achieve almost similar performance to natively compiled languages, both for sequential and parallel applications, being an alternative for HPC programming; (3) the recent advances in the efficient support of Java communications on shared memory and low-latency networks are bridging the gap between Java and natively compiled applications in HPC. Thus, the good prospects of Java in this area are attracting the attention of both industry and academia, which can take significant advantage of Java adoption in HPC.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte; AP2009-211

Design of scalable Java message-passing communications over InfiniBand

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-011-0654-9[Abstract] This paper presents ibvdev a scalable and efficient low-level Java message-passing communication device over InfiniBand. The continuous increase in the number of cores per processor underscores the need for efficient communication support for parallel solutions. Moreover, current system deployments are aggregating a significant number of cores through advanced network technologies, such as InfiniBand, increasing the complexity of communication protocols, especially when dealing with hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures such as clusters. Here, Java represents an attractive choice for the development of communication middleware for these systems, as it provides built-in networking and multithreading support. As the gap between Java and compiled languages performance has been narrowing for the last years, Java is an emerging option for High Performance Computing (HPC). The developed communication middleware ibvdev increases Java applications performance on clusters of multicore processors interconnected via InfiniBand through: (1) providing Java with direct access to InfiniBand using InfiniBand Verbs API, somewhat restricted so far to MPI libraries; (2) implementing an efficient and scalable communication protocol which obtains start-up latencies and bandwidths similar to MPI performance results; and (3) allowing its integration in any Java parallel and distributed application. In fact, it has been successfully integrated in the Java messaging library MPJ Express. The experimental evaluation of this middleware on an InfiniBand cluster of multicore processors has shown significant point-to-point performance benefits, up to 85% start-up latency reduction and twice the bandwidth compared to previous Java middleware on InfiniBand. Additionally, the impact of ibvdev on message-passing collective operations is significant, achieving up to one order of magnitude performance increases compared to previous Java solutions, especially when combined with multithreading. Finally, the efficiency of this middleware, which is even competitive with MPI in terms of performance, increments the scalability of communications intensive Java HPC applications.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-1673

Design of efficient Java message-passing collectives on multi-core clusters

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0464-5[Abstract] This paper presents a scalable and efficient Message-Passing in Java (MPJ) collective communication library for parallel computing on multi-core architectures. The continuous increase in the number of cores per processor underscores the need for scalable parallel solutions. Moreover, current system deployments are usually multi-core clusters, a hybrid shared/distributed memory architecture which increases the complexity of communication protocols. Here, Java represents an attractive choice for the development of communication middleware for these systems, as it provides built-in networking and multithreading support. As the gap between Java and compiled languages performance has been narrowing for the last years, Java is an emerging option for High Performance Computing (HPC). Our MPJ collective communication library increases Java HPC applications performance on multi-core clusters: (1) providing multi-core aware collective primitives; (2) implementing several algorithms (up to six) per collective operation, whereas publicly available MPJ libraries are usually restricted to one algorithm; (3) analyzing the efficiency of thread-based collective operations; (4) selecting at runtime the most efficient algorithm depending on the specific multi-core system architecture, and the number of cores and message length involved in the collective operation; (5) supporting the automatic performance tuning of the collectives depending on the system and communication parameters; and (6) allowing its integration in any MPJ implementation as it is based on MPJ point-to-point primitives. A performance evaluation on an InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet multi-core cluster has shown that the implemented collectives significantly outperform the original ones, as well as higher speedups when analyzing the impact of their use on collective communications intensive Java HPC applications. Finally, the presented library has been successfully integrated in MPJ Express (http://mpj-express.org), and will be distributed with the next release.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación; FPU; AP2009-2112Xunta de Galicia; PGIDIT06PXIB105228P

Editorial for FGCS Special issue on “Time-critical Applications on Software-defined Infrastructures”

Performance requirements in many applications can often be modelled as constraints related to time, for example, the span of data processing for disaster early warning [1], latency in live event broadcasting [2], and jitter during audio/video conferences [3]. These time constraints are often treated either in an “as fast as possible” manner, such as sensitive latencies in high-performance computing or communication tasks, or in a “timeliness” way where tasks have to be finished within a given window in real-time systems, as classified in [4]. To meet the required time constraints, one has to carefully analyse time constraints, engineer and integrate system components, and optimise the scheduling for computing and communication tasks. The development of a time-critical application is thus time-consuming and costly. During the past decades, the infrastructure technologies of computing, storage and networking have made tremendous progress. Besides the capacity and performance of physical devices, the virtualisation technologies offer effective resource management and isolation at different levels, such as Java Virtual Machines at the application level, Dockers at the operating system level, and Virtual Machines at the whole system level. Moreover, the network embedding [5] and software-defined networking [6] provide network-level virtualisation and control that enable a new paradigm of infrastructure, where infrastructure resources can be virtualised, isolated, and dynamically customised based on application needs. The software-defined infrastructures, including Cloud, Fog, Edge, software-defined networking and network function virtualisation, emerge nowadays as new environments for distributed applications with time-critical application requirements, but also face challenges in effectively utilising the advanced infrastructure features in system engineering and dynamic control. This special issue on “time-critical applications and software-defined infrastructures” focuses on practical aspects of the design, development, customisation and performance-oriented operation of such applications for Clouds and other distributed environments