JavaNow: A Framework for Parallel Computing on Networks of Workstations

Networks of workstations are becoming a dominant force in the distributed computing arena, this due primarily to the excellent price to performance ratio of such systems when compared to traditional massively parallel architectures. It is therefore critical to develop programming languages and environments that can help harness the raw computational power available on these systems. The JavaNow (Network of Workstations) system, a Java based framework for parallel programming on a network of workstations, is one such project. It creates a virtual parallel machine similar to the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) model, and provides distributed associative shared memory similar to Linda memory model but with a richer set of primitive operations. JavaNow provides a simple yet powerful framework for performing computation on networks of workstations. In addition to the Linda memory model, it provides for shared objects, publisher/subscriber based event notification, implicit multithreading, implicit synchronization, object dataflow, and collective communications similar to those defined in the Message Passing Interface (MPI).