Java and Parallelism?
The Web integration of Java gives it excellent “network” classes and support for message passing.
Thus “Java plus message passing” form of parallel computing is actually somewhat easier than in Fortran or C.
Coarse grain parallelism very natural in Java
“Data Parallel” languages features are NOT in Java and have to be added (as a translator) of NPAC’s HPJava to Java+Messaging just as HPF translates to Fortran plus message passing
Java has built in “threads” and a given Java Program can run multiple threads at a time
- In Web use, allows one to process Image in one thread, HTML page in another etc.
Can be used to do more general parallel computing but only on shared memory computers
- JavaVM (standard Java Runtime) does not support distributed memory systems