High-Performance Java Platform Computing: Multithreaded and Networked Programming (Paperback)

by Thomas W. Christopher (Author), George K., Ph.D. Thiruvathukal (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Threading and concurrency are crucial to building high-performance Java applications -- but they have a reputation for complexity. High Performance Java Computing thoroughly demystifies these advanced development techniques. It delivers practical programming solutions, proven design patterns, and a rigorously-tested code library -- everything developers need to build optimized Java software for technical, business, and E-commerce applications. Start by understanding how threading and concurrency can be used to solve a wide variety of performance problems, enabling the construction of more powerful networked applications. Master the Java 2 Threads classes, including daemon threads, thread control, scheduling, and more. Review the key problems of parallelism -- including deadlocks, race conditions, and synchronization -- and discover proven techniques for avoiding or resolving them. Finally, master advanced techniques for building optimized concurrent code, including Java monitors, parallel execution of subroutines in shared memory, and parallelizing loops.

From the Inside Flap
Preface

This is a book about programming high-performance multithreaded applications using the Java language.

Multithreading and multiprogramming, long heralded as useful ideas in the computing literature, have been the focus of numerous textbooks on operating systems, parallel and distributed computing, and, most, recently Java. Yet a key question remains unanswered: Why would one really use threads in the first place?

Our book attacks this question from the bottom up and the top down. Beginning with the bottom-up discussion, threads have been created with the primary goal of improving performance of software applications. At a low level, a thread is much like a process, but differs from processes in one key respect: resource consumption. This is because threads, unlike processes, share common code and data, thus having a lower cost of creation and context-switching overhead.

On the other hand, the low-level focus on threads-the mechanism-has much to do with why threads have not achieved widespread usage in applications. Threads do allow great advances in performance to be made, but not without some up-front program structuring. The fact that all threads share data structures can in many cases lead to poor performance, due to synchronization costs.

To answer the question posed earlier, we believe multithreading exists primarily to allow performance gains to be realized, particularly on scalable hardware platforms, such as parallel supercomputers, workstation clusters, and symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems. Our book emphasizes programming techniques and packages for high-end computing (often called the "server side" in the business world). We are concerned with using the power available on multiprocessor computers and computer networks to perform computations rapidly.

This book was conceived as a natural follow-up to a successful series of short courses we offered at the Illinois Institute of Technology and elsewhere to working professionals and graduate students alike. Additionally, between us we have approximately two decades of relevant teaching and research experience in the fields of high-performance computing, object-oriented systems, programming languages, and operating systems.

Our research in high-performance computing and languages has always focused on facilitating the development of concurrent, parallel, and distributed software, going back as far as 1988, when we first began working together on the Message Driven Computing (MDC) environment. We have developed a number of working programming languages and libraries to support such software development. All of the work we did in the past, however, was done in the C, Icon, and C++ programming languages. For this book, we have reworked many of our ideas into a form more suitable for the practicing software engineer, while fully exploiting the power of a true object language such as Java.

With its built-in support for concurrency via a monitorlike abstraction, Java makes concurrent programming easier for programmers than languages such as C and C++. We will discuss how monitors are adequate for solving many problems in concurrency, particularly the so-called classical synchronization problems, which have been well documented in operating-systems textbooks. As more complex libraries and software systems are developed, the evidence gathered supports the proposition that monitors, much like other low-level mechanisms for synchronization, break down. Monitors, despite being a higher-level mechanism for supporting concurrency, present the same problems as found in "less sophisticated" environments such as C and C++ (where low-level threads libraries, such as pthreads and Win32 threads, are used). We refer in the text to these problems (race conditions and deadlocks) as enemies. We present stategies for dealing with these enemies and a number of higher-level frameworks that enable the programmer to worry less often about them.

Java is one of the great programming languages of our time. Like many of the great programming languages, a company was behind its development, adoption, and popularity. The sensational marketing blitz was enough to make many of us think that all of the work on languages was now complete, so we could start packing our bags and look for other work. Now that the dust has settled, it is clear that Java does occupy an important space in the marketplace; however, there is a great deal of potential for exploring other programming languages and techniques. The environments in which Java is being considered will require at least a subset of the ideas presented in this book: network appliances, server-side computing, workstation clustering, and parallel systems, to name a few. In this book, our aim is to give the reader some insight into what Java does and does not provide, in terms of support for concurrency. What Java does not provide, we do provide with a working library of Java code that allows the programmer to "operate at a higher-level" (to borrow a phrase from IBM marketing from the OS/2 days).

This book, like all books, does not exist in a vacuum. There are a number of competing books, some of which are appearing in new editions during the next year. We believe our book will be the first of its kind in terms of multithreading and its application to real-world programming. It also provides the following benefits and features:

It presents a human-understandable explanation of multithreading, its implementation, and how it works in Java.

It helps the programmer to understand the very real problems encountered in concurrent systems, focused on race conditions, deadlock, and problems encountered when introducing parallelism and distribution. This particular aspect of our book brings to life the chapters on concurrency presented in "abstract" OS textbooks, wherein working code examples are seldom, if ever, provided.

It helps the programmer to understand the classic synchronization problems, which have suddenly been placed in the spotlight as more and more code is (incorrectly) being written to exploit concurrency.

It introduces high-level approaches to shared- and distributed-memory multithreading. This section will be of great interest to those who want to develop multithreaded applications but prefer to work at a higher level.

It shows how to extend the threads concept to the network. It shows how to extend the threads model beyond the single Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to a network of JVMs.

We hope you enjoy this book. It has been written to address the needs of a broad audience. There is introductory, intermediate, and advanced material. The book is designed to be progressive and can be used either as a reference or as a companion to a variety of courses. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter to reinforce the principles. Speaking of Code

Code for the Tools of Computing thread package is available through our company Web site at toolsofcomputing. You will find links to it on the book sub-Web at toolsofcomputing/JavaThreads. We also provide a number of other useful, free packages via the sub-Web.

The example programs are working examples. We have run all of them. We hope the printed versions are as error free as possible; however, mistakes do occur and bugs are found. We actually use our code for development and will regularly update the site to include the latest code. All of the code is freely available under a GNU LGPL-style license.

The algorithm animations available include parallel sorting algorithms and simulations of multiple readers and writers synchronizing with the monitors shown in "The Multiple Reader-Writer Monitors" on page 110. These animations are applets.

We will maintain an errata forum to report errors and corrections found after publication.AnimationsThe Multiple Readers-Writers Simulations Color Codes

The simulations include an array of buttons that indicate the states of the threads accessing the shared structure. The colors of the buttons the threads states:

Red Writing

Blue Reading

Magenta Waiting to write

Cyan Waiting to read

White Resting between reads or writes

Gray Has finished its iterations.

How to Change the Parameters

You can change the parameters in the multiple readers-writers simulations.

You may choose to have a thread choose randomly each time whether to read or write (the default) or to be always be a reader or always a writer. The "% reads" and "# readers" radio buttons choose which option. You use the corresponding text fields to specify the percent probability of reading or the number of threads that are readers, respectively.

To change any number, edit the field and then type ENTER. The new value will not be stored until ENTER is pressed.

You can choose whether the actual read, write, and rest times are constants or whether they are generated from negative exponential distributions. You are able to specify the times' constant or mean values. If you change the mean read, write, or rest times, you should probably not go much below 200ms; smaller values don't give Java enough time to refresh the display. Constant times give simulations that are easier to understand.

You can change any of the values in the left column. The bottom four text fields on the right are output fields. Although you can change the lower four fields yourself, making manual changes won't have any influence on the simulation.Experiments

There are several charts in this book showing the performance of parallel algorithms. These charts report experimental runs on an intel dual-processor system running Solaris located in the Java High Performance Computing laboratory at DePaul University in Chicago. The Java system has kernel threads, which allow both processors to execute threads in the same program simultaneously.

The experiments were run from scripts that executed, in random order, the algorithms, problem sizes, and number of threads. This was to avoid potential errors that could occur if the system had different loads at different times. If we did not randomize the order, we might not be seeing the effects of the parameters, but rather of system load. The runs in the scripts were separated with sleep calls in order to prevent Unix from "nicing" our priority down because our process is compute-bound.

Each algorithm-problem size-number of threads combination was run 32 times to allow the use of large-sample statistics.

In some of the summary charts, where we combine several runs, we did not run the experiments again with the same care for randomizing the runs; therefore, these comparisons may be viewed with suspicion, because they may show effects of differing system loads.Running the Exercises

To run programs for most of the exercises, you will need a multiprocessor and a kernel-threads version of Java (at least if you want to see any kind of performance improvement). Intel dual-processor systems have become inexpensive. Solaris and Linux are reasonable operating systems, as are Windows NT and successors.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1st edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130161640
• ISBN-13: 978-0130161642
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,379,096 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fairly good, November 17, 2000

By A Customer

Fairly good

The author first talks about the foundation of efficieny, scalability, parallelism..... etc.

Second part is the discussion of multithreading. The problems like race conditions, mutual exclusion, thread monitors, parallelizing loops and synchronization are discussed in great detail.

Some algorithms for increasing efficiency and performance diagrams are provided throughout the book to give reader a clear view in understanding the topics.

The last part is about network programming which talk about socket and simple messaging architecture.

The strength of this book over the other java performance tuning book is that it integrates some algorithms into the code(major factor) to increase performance rather than just talks about in preventing the use of certain low performance java code(minor factor).

However, the book seems losing the way in targeting audience. The content of the book doesn't specific to any field.