To be held at SC98 Orlando for a total of 3 hours on the morning of Friday November 13

1. Java Grande I: Rationale Status and the Forum
2. Java Grande II: Issues and Futures

General Java Grande Resource at NPAC and NIST Numerics in Java Grande

This is a set of two linked panels, which will focus on the status, issues and futures of Java Grande and include a presentation of and public comment on the activities of the Java Grande forum. Grande applications are large-scale applications typical of HPCC, scientific and engineering computations, or distributed simulations. The goal of the Java Grande forum is to further community activities that will make Java a much better (and probably the best) programming environment for Grande applications. The first three meetings of the Forum were March 1,98 May 9-10 and August 6-7. The Panels will consist of presentations from the community covering technologies, applications and studies relevant to Java Grande, which will set the scene and give possibly controversial position papers. The two Java Grande working groups will present their current findings and lead an open discussion. The public comments will be integrated into revised versions of the working group reports.

Audience for both panels should include academia, government and industry. The topics should interest people from both application and computer science (technology) fields.

1. What is Java Grande and should we care?
2. Can we develop the industry support (in terms of quality tools and changes in Java standards) to make Java a superior programming environment for Grande applications?
3. What are the changes in Java (if any) needed to realize the goal in 2)
4. What are the key research issues and technologies underlying Java Grande
5. What application areas are particularly enabled/helped by Java Grande

There are no special A/V needs anticipated.

The above remarks are common to both panels. We follow with the specific abstracts of the two panels.

Moderator: Geoffrey Fox (Syracuse University)

This panel will set the scene and present initial findings of the two Java Grande Forum working groups. It will consist of approximately 5 presentations. The first part of the panel (of about 50 minutes) will consist of around 3 presentations, which will define Java Grande and describe critical technologies, applications and performance studies of relevance to Java Grande. Technologies could include nifty compilers or distributed computing infrastructure. Applications could include libraries or larger scale systems. These talks will be designed to complement any related papers in the main SC98 technical sessions. The final 40 minutes will feature the two forum working groups -- namely:

1. Numerics and Libraries led by Roldan Pozo and Ron Boisvert of NIST.
2. Applications and Systems (Parallel/Distributed Computing) led by Dennis Gannon (Indiana) and Denis Caromel (Inria).

Here we will briefly describe forum (goals and process) and present current state of findings of these two working groups.

Moderator: Siamak Hassanzadeh (Sun Microsystems)

This session will start with selected short (approximately 10 minute) presentations on alternative or augmentative ideas with goal of broadening the involved community. Topics will include "experiences from Industry users" (NAG, VNI, MathWorks), views from world community (there is a relevant meeting in Europe(Cardiff) during the summer), and naysayers (Why Java Grande is doomed). These talks will be chosen for their broad impact on Java Grande and not particularly their technical wizardry. We will actively solicit suggested contributors. This 30-40 minute introduction will be followed by a debate of the two draft reports presented in previous panel. To encourage this, we will make the documents available on the web before the meeting. Audience comments will be incorporated into revised versions of the reports and will help set the agenda for future forum activities.