A Distributed Selectors Runtime System for Java Applications

Citation

Arghya Chatterjee (Rice University), Branko Gvoka (University of Novi Sad, Serbia), Bing Xue (Rice University), Zoran Budimlic (Rice University), Shams Imam (Two Sigma Investments, LP), Vivek Sarkar (Rice University). A Distributed Selectors Runtime System for Java Applications. PPPJ '16 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java Platform: Virtual Machines, Languages, and Tools

Abstract

The demand for portable mainstream programming models supporting scalable, reactive and versatile distributed computing is growing dramatically with the proliferation of manycore/heterogeneous processors on portable devices and cloud computing clusters that can be elastically and dynamically allocated. With such changes, distributed software systems and applications are shifting towards service oriented architectures (SOA) that consist of largely decoupled, dynamically replaceable components and connected via loosely coupled, interactive networks that may exhibit more complex coordination and synchronization patterns.

In this paper, we propose the Distributed Selector (DS) model, to address the aforementioned requirements via a simple easy-to-use API. Our implementation of this model runs on distributed JVMs, and features automated bootstrap and global termination. We focus on the Selector Model (a generalization of the actor model) as a foundation for creating distributed programs and introduce a unified runtime system that supports both shared memory and distributed multi-node execution of such programs. The multiple guarded mailboxes, a unique and novel property of Selectors, enable the programmer to easily specify coordination patterns that are strictly more general than those supported by the Actor model.

We evaluate the performance of our selector-based distributed implementation using benchmarks from the Savina benchmark suite [13]. Our results show promising scalability performance for various message exchange patterns. We also demonstrate high programming productivity arising from high-level abstraction and location transparency in the HJ Distributed Selector Runtime library (as evidenced by minimal differences between single-node and multi-node implementations of a selector-based application), as well as the contribution of automated system bootstrap and global termination capabilities.

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