HKJava.com > Hong Kong Java User Group, 18 December 2002

Time: 19:00 (presentation starts at 19:30)
Venue: INETS, 2 Floor Chuang's Enterprise Building, 382 Lockhart Road, Wanchai
Topic: The JESSICA Project
Speaker: Dr. Cho-Li Wang, Systems Research Group, The University of Hong Kong


Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation

About the JESSICA2 Talk

In this talk, Dr. Wang will present a new distributed Java virtual machine, named JESSICA2, based on their previous project JESSICA ("Java-Enabled Single-System-Image Computing Architecture") to support parallel execution of multithreaded Java applications in a networked cluster environment. JESSICA2 is implemented as a middleware at the virtual machine level that makes a cluster of PCs/workstations appear as a single, multi-processor machine to Java applications. With JESSICA2, users can launch any multithreaded Java application onto the cluster without modification of its Java code. JESSICA2 supports runtime Java thread migration by performing dynamic native code instrumentation inside the JIT compiler. Java threads can freely move across node boundaries and execute in parallel to achieve more scalable computing using clusters. With the new JIT compiler and thread migration support, Java threads that are executing computation hotspots can be migrated to other nodes to achieve more effective load balancing. Performance results obtained from the recently built 300-node PC cluster (HKU "Gideon 300", now ranked 175th in the world's TOP500 supercomputer list) will be discussed.

About the Speaker

Dr. Cho-Li Wang received his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1985. He obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California in 1990 and 1995 respectively. He is currently an associative professor with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at The University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in Cluster and Grid Computing. He is a member of the executive committee for IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC) and also a core member of Asia-Pacific Grid (ApGrid).

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