\paragraph{Java Grande Forum.}  The Java Grande Forum is a group of academic
and industrial partners aiming to promote Java standards for
communication and compute intensive applications.  The process was
initiated in march 1998 after a series of successful workshops on Java for
Computational Science and Engineering---held in Syracuse, Las Vegas,
and Palo Alto---demonstrated a broad community interest in the
area.  The stated goal of the Java Grande Forum is to develop
community consensus and recommendations for either changes to Java or
establishment of standards (frameworks) for Grande libraries and
services. Over 1999, we have made substantial progress in the numerical
area where we are developing proposals to address floating point performance,
complex numbers and efficient multi-dimensional rectangular arrays. Other
activities include Java MPI linkage, scientific benchmarks and use of Java in
problem solving environments. A very succesful conference -- Java Grande '99
-- sponsored by ACM was held in June 99. See {\tt http://www.javagrande.org}.


\paragraph{Performance Analysis.}
Syracuse and Maryland completed a {\small DARPA}-sponsored
project to develop a framework that makes it possible to provide
approximate predictions of the performance that can be achieved by
sophisticated new applications on new high-performance architectures.
A simulation-based framework has been developed and applied to both
loosely-synchronous adaptive applications and data exploration/fusion
applications.  Initial results are quite promising, with validation
experiments showing that the simulators can predict the performance of
application kernels quite accurately, and that we can trade off
accuracy of the predictions for simulation time. The software system
PETASIM developed by Syracuse has been extended to a broad range of
applications. It is provided with a convenient java front end for
rapid prototyping. See http://kopernik:4096/petasim/V1.0/PetaSIM.html