HPJava: Java for Data Parallel Programming

Today we see a healthy diversity of projects aiming to harness Java for scientific (or “Grande”) computing. A number of these approaches were reviewed in a recent article in this series. In this article we will focus instead on one particular project of this kind, ongoing at our labs in Indiana University. The HPJava project aims to support scientific and parallel computing in a modern object-oriented, Internet-friendly environment—namely the Java platform. To a large extent we do this by leveraging language and library features that have been popularly associated with Fortran. So HPJava imports features like “scientific” multidimensional array syntax, and distributed arrays similar to those in High Performance Fortran. At a more language-independent level, HPJava also introduces a slightly unusual parallel programming model, somewhere in between the classical HPF and MPI extremes.