MPI or PVM enabled jre?

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 11:09:21AM -0400, Michael T. Prinkey wrote:
> I certainly wouldn't want to speak for the entire community, but I think
> that most of us are just now crawling out of the FORTRAN days.  The next
> step is to C, and not even to C++.  Experience has borne out the
> performance advantages of "low-tech" languages like FORTRAN and C for
> intense number crunching.  The performance of object-oriented languages
> in general and Java in particular are suspect for the types of problems
> that typically require high-performance parallel hardware.

Object orientation has nothing to do with it.  What so ever.

Java has garbage collection, and unless you can switch that off somehow you
will have unpredictable performance patterns of your code.  That would be a
show-stopper for many codes.

Also, I don't know if the java compilers are as fast as good C/C++/Fortran
compilers.   Another concern may be that the Java language forces the compiler
to do less-than-optimal operations on data - I don't know if this is a problem
though.  The language has a lot to say about the code that an optimal compiler
can possibly produce.

I think one of the reasons we don't see computational utility libraries (or
whatever you prefer to call them) for Java is, that the language offers very
little for the scientist.  It forces everything into an object-oriented
paradigm, while many (most?) computational codes don't fit in there at all.  In
my oppinion that's the biggest drawback of the language - it significantly
limits the set of problems you want to solve with it, when you have a choice.

-- 
................................................................
:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
:        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: