%T Cluster Computing and JCSP Networking
%A Peter H. Welch,  Brian Vinter
%E  James S. Pascoe,  Roger J. Loader,  Vaidy S. Sunderam
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2002
%X Hoare\[rs]s algebra of Communicating Sequential Processes
   (CSP) enables a view of systems as layered networks of
   concurrent components, generating and responding to events
   communicated to each other through channels, barriers and
   other (formally defined) synchronisation primitives. The
   resulting image and discipline is close to hardware design
   and correspondingly easy to visualise, reason about, compose
   and scale. JCSP is a library of Java packages providing an
   (occam) extended version of this model that may be used
   alongside, or as a replacement for, the very different
   threads\-and\-monitors concurrency mechanisms built into
   Java. The current release (JCSP 1.0) supports concurrency
   within a single Java Virtual Machine (which may be
   multi\-processor). This paper reports early experiments with
   JCSP.net, an extension of JCSP for the dynamic construction
   of CSP networks across distributed environments. The aims of
   JCSP.net are to simplify the construction and programming of
   dynamically distributed and parallel systems. It provides
   high\-level support for CSP architectures, unifying
   concurrency logic within and between processors. The
   experiments are on some classical HPC problems, an area of
   work for which JCSP.net was not primarily designed. However,
   low overheads in the supporting infrastructure were a
   primary consideration * along with an intuitive and
   high\-level distributed programming model (based on CSP).
   Results reported show JCSP holding up well against * and
   often exceeding * the performance obtained from existing
   tools such as mpiJava and IBM*s TSpaces. The experimental
   platform was a cluster of 16 dual\-processor PIII Linux
   machines. It is expected that future optimisations in the
   pipeline for the JCSP.net infrastructure will improve the
   results presented here. JCSP and JCSP.net were developed at
   the University of Kent.