The explosion of java over the last year has been driven
largely by its in role in bringing a new generation of interactive web pages to
World Wide Web. Undoubtedly various features of the languages-compactness, byte
code portability, security, and so on-make it particularly attractive as an implementation
languages for applets embedded in web pages. But it is clear that the ambition
of the Java development team go well beyond enhancing the functionality of HTML
documents."Java is designed to meet the
challenges of application development on the context of heterogeneous, network-wide
distributed environments. Paramount among these chalanges is secure delivery of
applications that consume the minimum of systems resources, can run on any hardware
and software platform, can be extended dynamically."Several
of these concerns are mirrored in developments in the High Performance Computing
world over a number of years. A decade ago the focus of interest in the parallel
computing community was on parallel hardware. A parallel computer was typically
built from specialized processors through a proprietary high-performance communication
switch.
If the machine also had to be programmed in a proprietary language, that
was an acceptable price for the benefits of using a supercomputer. This attitude
was not sustainable as one parallel architecture gave way to another, and cost
of porting software became exorbitant. For several years now, portability across
platforms had been a central concern in parallel computing.HPJava
is a programming language extended from Java to support parallel programming,
especially (but not exclusively) data parallel programming on message passing
and distributed memory systems, from multi-processor systems to workstation clusters.
