A test suite for high-performance parallel Java

The Java programming language has a number of features that make it attract ive for writing high-quality, portable parallel programs. Aobject formulati on, strong typing and the exception model make programs easier to create, d ebug and maintain. The elegant threading provides a simple route to paralle lism on shared-memory machines. Anticipating great improvements in numerica l performance, this paper presents a suite of simple programs that indicate how a pure Java Navier-Stokes solver might perform. The suite includes a p arallel Euler solver. We present results from a 32-processor Hewlett-Packar d machine and a 4-processor Sun server. While speedup is excellent on both machines, indicating a high-quality thread scheduler, the single-processor performance needs much improvement. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Ail lights reserved.