A molecular dynamics computer simulation performance comparison of Java versus C

The relative performance of molecular dynamics (MD) Computer simulations of fluids written in ANSI C is compared to that achieved by a comparable prog ram written in Java. The performance of the Java program is shown to be dep endent upon its runtime environment. The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) fro m the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.2 provides a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler option on Solaris and Windows 95 platforms which decreases the execution t ime by approximately 4 - 10x compared to the standard Java interpreter. The compiled Java implementation of the MD computer simulation runs between 30 100% slower, depending on the platform. compared to the equivalent C imple mentation. The stability of the two simulations, as measured by conservatio n of energy is shown to be identical to within similar to1% over 10(5) time steps.