Subject: Benchmarking scientific Java

From: [email-masked] (Walter Bays)
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 15:05:14 -0800 (PST)

I chair a committee in the SPEC benchmark consortium (www.specbench.org)
working on benchmarks for Java. I was pleasantly surprised to find the
information from the Syracuse conference, and see how much activity has
been occurring in Java for scientific/engineering computation.

Would this mailing list be an appropriate venue for me to outline what
SPEC is doing, and to solicit comments and input?

	Thanks,
	Walter

---

From: "Dan E. Kelley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 22:41:05 -0400

On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Walter Bays wrote:
>...

Hi Walter.  I'd say this is a terrific forum for a discussion of SPEC
test results.  I need something quantitative to convince me that java
is workable.

I am a scientist who uses C and C++ extensively.  I am attracted to
the cleanliness of the java design.  I think java may be close to C++
in usefulness, even superior in some respects.  The main exception at
present seems to be the lack of a suite of object libraries for such
things as matrix operations, mathematical operations including
optimization and differential equation solution, etc.  Such things
exist in several forms in the C, C++ and FORTRAN (yup, I said I was a
scientist!) worlds, and in the increasingly popular matlab community.

Still, not all science applications need this box of tools, and we
might expect the tools to become available over time.  This leaves
just a single worry in my mind -- speed.  From what I've read, java is
very much slower than C++.  (Mostly the statements are quite vague --
hence the need for reasonable benchmarks.)  Scientists need speed.  We
spend a lot of our time writing proposals to buy the hot box of the
year, because last year's box produces results with last year's
accuracy and scope, and these have already been published.

I've read that java is 15 times slower than C++.  Given a doubling of
computing power every 1.5 years, this means switching to java means
going back nearly 7 years, in terms of ability to accomplish computing
work.  Put another way, a model simulation that used to take months
would now take years.  Therefore, the year-end paper describing the
results turns into a decade-end paper ... except that it won't,
because the scientist will have lost his/her job in the meantime,
since tenure panels don't appreciate deliberate choices to slow down
productivity so dramatically.

PS: I'm hoping that the readers of this list are science-types, not
java-types, so that they take my comments as personal experience
instead of as a trashing of a language which is clearly lovely for
many purposes.

Dan E. Kelley                   internet:         mailto:[email-masked]
Oceanography Department         phone:                       (902)494-1694
Dalhousie University            fax:                         (902)494-2885
Halifax, NS, CANADA, B3H 4J1    WWW:  http://www.phys.ocean.dal.ca/~kelley