This special issue is one devoted to selected papers from the ACM 1999 Java Grande Conference. It has held in San Francisco on June 12-14,1999. All the papers have been revised and re-refereed to ensure appropriate journal quality. This was the fourth of a series of meetings, exploring the use of the Java programming language for scientific and engineering computing and high-performance network computing - a range of applications that has been denoted with the epithet "Grande". The previous Java Grande workshops were held very successfully in Syracuse in 1996, Las Vegas in 1997, and in Palo Alto in 1998. The proceedings were also published in special issues of Concurrency: Practice and Experience. (Volume 9, Issues 6,11; Volume 10, Issues 11-13).

The papers have been divided into 3 groups:

  1. Largely Java Virtual Machine, Language and compiler issues
  2. Largely technology of general applicability
  3. Largely distributed computing and applications

The Java Grande conference focuses on the use of Java in the broad area of high-performance computing; including engineering and scientific applications, simulations, data-intensive applications, and other emerging application areas that exploit parallel and distributed computing or combine communication and computing. We believe that Java will play an increasingly important role in these areas. The goal is to provide feedback to users and language developers on what is required to successfully deploy Java in a broad range of scientific and high-performance network computing systems.

The 1998 workshop initiated the Java Grande Forum process which has organized activities aimed at making Java a superior programming environment for "Grande applications". This conference included a short forum meeting while further details about related activities will be found at http://www.javagrande.org.

I would like to thank the many parties, which helped make this conference a success. First, thanks to ACM SIGPLAN for sponsoring this conference. Klaus Schauser (Department of Computer Science, University of California Santa Barbara) and Marc Snir (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights) did nearly all the hard work in organizing meeting and getting papers. A special thanks goes to NSF (Frederica Darema) and DARPA (Jose Munoz) for making funds available to support student participation. It is our belief that it is very important to involve young scientists in this process. Thanks to Sun Microsystems for help in scheduling the event and IBM for sponsoring the dinner.

Geoffrey Fox

Physics and Computer Science

Syracuse University