Benchmarking Java against C and Fortran for scientific applications

Increasing interest is being shown in the use of Java for scientific applications. The Java Grande benchmark suite 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 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 has 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 (notable Intel Pentium) the performance gap is now quite small.