An approach for non-intrusively adding malleable fork/join parallelism into ordinary JavaBean compliant applications

Abstract

Motivated by the advent of powerful hardware such as SMP machines and execution environments such as Grids, research in parallel programming has gained much attention within the distributed computing community. There is a substantial body of efforts in the form of parallel libraries and frameworks that supply developers with programming tools to exploit parallelism in their applications. Still, many of these efforts prioritize performance over other important characteristics such as code invasiveness, ease of use and independence of the underlying executing hardware/environment. In this paper, we present EasyFJP, a new approach for semi-automatically injecting parallelism into sequential Java applications that offers a convenient balance to these four aspects. EasyFJP is based upon the popular fork/join parallel pattern, and combines implicit, application-level parallelism with explicit, non-invasive application tuning. Experiments performed with several classic CPU-intensive benchmarks and a real-world application confirm that EasyFJP effectively addresses these problems while delivers very competitive performance.