Skyway Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Managed languages such as Java and Scala are prevalently used in development of large-scale distributed systems. Under the managed runtime, when performing data transfer across machines, a task frequently conducted in a Big Data system, the system needs to serialize a sea of objects into a byte sequence before sending them over the network. The remote node receiving the bytes then deserializes them back into objects. This process is both performance-inefficient and labor-intensive: (1) object serialization/deserialization makes heavy use of reflection, an expensive runtime operation and/or (2) serialization/deserialization functions need to be hand-written and are error-prone. This paper presents Skyway, a JVM-based technique that can directly connect managed heaps of different (local or remote) JVM processes. Under Skyway, objects in the source heap can be directly written into a remote heap without changing their formats. Skyway provides performance benefits to any JVM-based system by completely eliminating the need (1) of invoking serialization/deserialization functions, thus saving CPU time, and (2) of requiring developers to hand-write serialization functions.

published proceedings

  • ACM SIGPLAN Notices

author list (cited authors)

  • Nguyen, K., Fang, L. u., Navasca, C., Xu, G., Demsky, B., & Lu, S.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • Nguyen, Khanh||Fang, Lu||Navasca, Christian||Xu, Guoqing||Demsky, Brian||Lu, Shan

publication date

  • November 2018