An evaluation of java for numerical computing

Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of high perfor- mance numerical software in Java. Our primary goals are to characterize the performance of object-oriented numerical software written in Java and to investigate whether Java is a suitable language for such endea- vors. We have implemented JLAPACK, a subset of the LAPACK libr- ary in Java. LAPACK is a high-performance Fortran 77 library used to solve common linear algebra problems. JLAPACK is an object-oriented library using encapsulation, inheritance, and exception handling. It per- forms within a factor of four of the optimized Fortran version for certain platforms and test cases. When used with the native BLAS library, JLA- PACK performs comparably with the Fortran version using the native BLAS library. We conclude that high-performance numerical software could be written in Java if a few concerns about language features and compilation strategies are addressed.