Java and asynchronous iterative applications: large scale experiments

This paper focuses on large scale experiments with Java and asynchronous iterative applications. In those applications, tasks are dependent and the use of distant clusters may be difficult, for example, because of latencies, heterogeneity, and synchronizations. Experiments have been conducted on the Grid'5000 platform using a new version of the Jace environment. We study the behavior of an application (the Poisson problem) with the following experimentation conditions: one and several sites, large number of processors (from 80 to 500), different communication protocols (RMI, sockets and NIO), synchronous and asynchronous model. The results we obtained, demonstrate both the scalability of the Jace environment and its ability to support wide-area deployments and the robustness of asynchronous iterative algorithms in a large scale context.