JPPF, the Java Parallel Processing Framework [LWN.net]

The Java Parallel Processing Framework (JPPF) is a cross-platform GPL-licensed tool set for controlling the execution of CPU-intensive tasks across multiple execution nodes. JPPF is intended to be used in the scientific data processing field.

Java Parallel Processing Framework is a set of tools and APIs to facilitate the parallelization of CPU intensive applications, and distribute their execution over a network of heterogenous nodes. It is intended to run in clusters and grids.

A brief feature list of JPPF includes:

API support for delegation of parallelized tasks to local and remote nodes.
User interface tools for task administration and monitoring functions.
Java Swing-based user interface.
Real-time adaptive load balancing.
Scalable to an arbitrary number of nodes.
Fail-over and recovery support.
Limited code intrusiveness.
Runs on Linux and several Windows variants.

The architecture document gives a top-level overview of the system's design. The user's manual shows how to set up and fine tune JPPF for solving an example matrix multiplication problem. The JPPF API documentation details the underlying code, and the screenshots page shows the software in action.

The initial JPPF beta release, version 0.6.0, has been announced. "This release is the first beta version of the Java Parallel Processing Framework. From now on, all the work will be dedicated to testing, bug fixing, and documentation fixing, until it is deemed "stable". There will be intermediate beta, then release candidate, release, so don't lose hope." The release features a complete user guide, a new matrix multiplication example, bug fixes and documentation improvements.

JPPF is available for download here. Dependencies include version 5 of the Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) and Apache Ant 1.6.2 or newer. See the readme document for installation details.

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