From Java Grande (a.k.a. Java for High Performance Computing) in a Nutshell Sun MicroSystems Java Day at CMU Pittsburgh -- Sept 26 1998. byGeoffrey C. Fox
There are several forms of parallelism
a) Fine grain functional parallelism as in overlap of communication and computation
b) Coarse grain distributed objects
c) Fine grain data parallelism which is historically either implemented with high level language (HPF) or explicit user defined message passing(MPI) -- this gives "massive parallelism" as in parallelism over grid points or particles in scientific computing
In a Nutshell, Java is better than previous languages for a) and b) and no worse for c)
Automatically provides "task parallelism" which needs to be added in painful fashion for Fortran
The Web integration of Java gives it excellent "network" classes and support for message passing.
