Endorsing Supercomputing Applications to Java Language

We present a scalable, open source realization of MPI-2 standard for Java, seamlessly integrated in Open MPI, as a reaction to novel challenges of supercomputing in the web application domain. A number of Java software solutions developed for the Web, such as coming from Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, and other domains, have begun to face performance and scalability challenges, for which MPI has proved to be an efficient solution in the “traditional” high performance computing languages, such as C and Fortran. We demonstrate that the native Java language design prevents MPI implementations to scale massively on productional supercomputing systems, and present a solution of overcoming the scalability issues by integrating in the native C realization of Open MPI. We also point out the design features of Open MPI that enable the proliferation of MPI into Java applications. Finally, we present some successful pilot scenarios implemented with MPI in Java and discuss future work in terms of promising Java applications of Open MPI, such as Random Indexing of large semantically annotated text sets.