Transparent scalability with clustering for Java e-science applications

Abstract

The two-decade long history of events relating object-oriented programming, the development of persistence and transactional support, and the aggregation of multiple nodes in a single-system image cluster, appears to convey the following conclusion: programmers ideally would develop and deploy applications against a single shared global memory space (heap of objects) of mostly unbounded capacity, with implicit support for persistence and concurrency, transparently backed by a possibly large number of clustered physical machines. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the design of OODB systems for Java applications: (O3)2 (pronounced ozone squared). It aims at providing to developers a single-system image of virtually unbounded object space/heap with support for object persistence, object querying, transactions and concurrency enforcement, backed by a cluster of multi-core machines with Java VMs that is kept transparent to the user/developer. It is based on an existing persistence framework (ozone-db) and the feasibility and performance of our approach has been validated resorting to the OO7 benchmark. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.