Networking Performance for Distributed Objects in Java

In network-based concurrent computing systems communication performance is always a crucial factor and a bottleneck even in conventional environments and therefore likely to be critical in Java based systems. In order to obtain a baseline measure for distributed object communications performance in Java, in the context of distributed HPC systems, we have undertaken a benchmarking exercise. Our experiments show some interesting and somewhat surprising results viz., that the overhead introduced by Java over C socket programming is very small, that the overhead of object serialization is highly asymmetric, and that memory bandwidth is crucial for object serialization. Our results and findings are presented in this paper.