Basic HTML version of Foils prepared 12 August 1996

Foil 4 Some Critical Features of Java and Parallelism

From Master Foilset Web Based Network Technologies for Scientific Computing CRPC NSF Review August 15-16 1996 -- 16 August 96. by Geoffrey C. Fox
Secs 113
Large Scale Applications (as discussed by Foster) need many forms of parallelism
  • Coarse Grain Software Integration or Coordination
    • Naturally built into Java through Applet mechanism and networking classes
  • Data Parallelism -- needed for "massive parallelism"
Java needs (runtime and perhaps language) extension to support HPF/HPC++ like data parallelism but Foster's talk has shown that "Java plus message passing" is already here
  • Note that Fortran or C plus message passing (PVM,MPI) is dominant implementation technology for data parallelism over last ten years
It is possible that Java will not "make it" but current momentum is hard to derail!
  • Limbo (A T and T) and Active-X (Microsoft) are possibilities
If Java is not the web language of future, then whatever replaces it must be better and our remarks should be applied to its replacement!

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