Java for High Performance Computing

Java offers a number of benefits as a language for High Performance Computing (HPC), especially in the context of the Computational Grid. The first section of this document summarises these benefits with an aim of motivating the use of Java for HPC. Although Java offers a number of potential benefits, there are a number of issues surrounding the use of Java for HPC, principally performance, numerics and parallelism. The remainder of this document considers these different issues, focusing on performance and parallelism. Performance issues relevant to HPC applications will be examined, and benchmarks for evaluating different Java environments, for inter-language comparisons and for testing the performance and scalability of different Java parallel models (native threads, message passing and OpenMP) will be considered.

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