Ibis 1.3 review

Ibis is an open source Java grid software project of the Computer Systems group, which is part of the Computer Science department of

License: BSD License File size: 15620K Developer: Rob van Nieuwpoort

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Ibis is an open source Java grid software project of the Computer Systems group, which is part of the Computer Science department of the Faculty of Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Using Ibis, software can be developed which runs reliably and efficiently on a grid. Programs can, through Ibis, make use of high speed networking hardware while still remaining portable.

Ibis project is possible to write Ibis programs using multiple programming models, including standard Java RMI, models which support group communication, a divide-and-conquer model, and message passing.

Ibis is designed as a multi layer system. See the picture of the Ibis design below. On top of the system are the applications. These applications can use any of the programming models present in Ibis.

Available models include standard Java RMI, a divide and conqueror model called Satin, and GMI, a version of RMI enhanced with group communication. The next layer is the Ibis Portability Layer, or IPL.

The IPL acts as a common interface for the different programming models to the bottom implementation layer. Multiple implementations are available.

Some using 100% Java code to ensure portability, and some taking advantage of local high speed networks such as Myrinet using native code.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds MPJ/Ibis, a pure Java implementation of the MPJ programming interface that has been defined by the Java Grande forum to provide MPI-like message passing for Java applications.
Shared objects for Satin were added.
This is a replacement (and major improvement) of the TupleSpace.
The TupleSpace is still there, but it is deprecated and will probably not be there anymore in the next Ibis release.
The connection setup code was improved and rewritten.
Various scalability issues were fixed, mostly in the nameserver.
Ibis now scales up to at least a thousand nodes.