Benchmarking Java against C and Fortran for scientific applications

Abstract

Increasing interest is being shown in the use of Java for scientific applications. The Java Grande benchmark suite [4] was designed with such applications primarily in mind. The perceived lack of performance of Java still deters many potential users, despite recent advances in just-in-time (JIT) and adaptive compilers. There are however few benchmark results available comparing Java to more traditional languages such as C and Fortran. To address this issue, a subset of the Java Grande Benchmarks have been re-written in C and Fortran allowing direct performance comparisons between the three languages. The performance of a range of Java execution environments, C and Fortran compilers have been tested across a number of platforms using the suite. These demonstrate that on some platforms (notably Intel Pentium) the performance gap is now quite small.