JavaNws: The Network Weather Service for the Desktop

Chandra Krintz and Rich Wolski

Abstract

As research and implementation continue to facilitate high performance computing in Java, applications can benefit from resource management and prediction tools. In this work, we present such a tool for network round trip time and bandwidth between a user's desktop and any machine running a web server (this assumes that the user's browser is capable of supporting Java 1.1 and above). JavaNws is a Java implementation and extension of a powerful subset of the Network Weather Service (NWS), a performance prediction toolkit that dynamically characterizes and forecasts the performance available to an application. The JavaNws capitalizes on the Java execution model to eliminate the need for NWS installation and login accounts on the machines of interest. In addition, we provide a quantitative equivalence study of the Java and C socket interface and show that the data collected by the JavaNws is as predictable as, that collected by the NWS (using C).