Java Virtual Machine support for object serialization

Abstract

AbstractDistributed computing has become increasingly popular in the high‐performance community. Java's remote method invocation (RMI) provides a simple, yet powerful method for implementing parallel algorithms. The performance of RMI has been less than adequate, however, and object serialization is often identified as a major performance inhibitor. We believe that object serialization is best performed in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), where information regarding object layout and hardware communication resources are readily available. We implement a subset of Java's object serialization protocol in native code, using the Java Native Interface (JNI) and JVM internals. Experiments show that our approach is up to eight times faster than Java's original object serialization protocol for array objects. Also, for linked data structures our approach obtains a moderate speedup and better scalability. Evaluation of our object serialization implementation in an RMI framework indicates that a higher throughput can be obtained. Parallel applications, written using RMI, obtain better speedups and scalability when this more efficient object serialization is used. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.