We describe an experiment in the development of an efficient Java support for task farm computations. The support allows Java programmers to rapidly develop parallel task farm applications starting from the plain sequential code. The target architecture we considered during the development of the support is a cluster of Unix workstations.
We show experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and we discuss the performance of this Java task farm support used on a typical workstation cluster.
The task farm support discussed here is the first step towards the implementation of a full skeleton based parallel programming environment in Java.