Java Workshop Explores Applications in High-Performance Network Computing

The ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing, held February 28 to
March 1 at Stanford University, gave 200 attendees the opportunity to learn what is required to
successfully deploy the Java programming language in scientific and high-performance network
computing environments. This was the third in a series of workshops originally started by CRPC
researcher Geoffrey Fox of the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University. The
previous Java workshops were held in Syracuse in 1996 and Las Vegas in 1997.

Co-chaired by Siamak Hassanzadeh (Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.) and Klaus Schauser
(University of California at Santa Barbara), the 1998 workshop focused on the use of Java in
engineering and scientific computing, simulations, parallel and distributed computing, data-intensive
applications, and other emerging areas that combine communication and computing. Eighteen papers
selected from 57 submissions covered implementation and compiler technology, numerical libraries,
communication, applications, distributed computing environments, visualization, and other areas of
Java technology. Another 18 papers were presented in a special poster session.

The Program Committee included CRPC researchers Fox, K. Mani Chandy (Caltech), Jack Dongarra
(University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory),
Dennis Gannon (Indiana University), and Carl Kesselman (University of Southern California).
Gannon chaired a session that featured a paper co-authored by Dongarra, "Developing Numerical
Libraries for Java." Chandy and co-researchers Adam Rifkin and Eve Schooler of Caltech presented a
poster on "Using Announce-Listen with Global Events to Develop Distributed Control Systems." Fox
and co-researchers Erol Akarsu and Tomasz Haupt of Syracuse gave a talk on "DARP: Java-based
Data Analysis and Rapid Prototyping Environment for Distributed High Performance Computations," 
while Byeongseob Ki and Scott Klasky from Syracuse described their Java-based approach to
"Collaborative Scientific Data Visualization". In a poster, a Syracuse group led by Bryan Carpenter
described their HPJava activity to incorporate data parallelism into Java.

The workshop included a half-day Java Grande Forum, chaired by Fox, to develop a community
consensus and recommendations on key aspects of Java and its associated runtime to increase the
ease of use and performance of the language in large-scale computations. Steering committee
members are now being selected to organize a May forum, where serious discussions on
improvements to Java will continue. It is expected to involve major High Performance Computing
Community representation from academia, government and industry, including Sun Microsystems, IBM,
Intel, and Microsoft. The forum hopes to shape the development of Java so that it does combine
high performance with its natural advantages due to its strong industry and web support. This could
lead to Java becoming the premier language for scientific and engineering computation.

The 1998 workshop was sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, with funding from the NSF and DARPA to
support student participation. Sun Microsystems printed the proceedings and Microsoft sponsored a
dinner for attendees on February 28.

For more information about the 1998 Java workshop, including 35 online papers, see
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/conferences/java98/. For a general resource that includes a mailing list pointer
and papers from the first two meetings, see http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/javaforcse/.