Java Grande Forum Established
July 1998
Ronald Boisvert and Roldan Pozo of ITL's Mathematical and Computational
Sciences Division were named Co-Chairs of the Numerics Working Group of
the Java Grande Forum (JGF) at its innaugural meeting in Palo Alto, CA
on March 1, 1998. The JGF is an open forum of industrial, government and
academic researchers and software developers interested in improving the
Java language and environment for use in high performance computing. The
work of the JGF has the support of Sun Microsystems as part of its open
standardization process for Java. The Numerics Working Group is chartered
to be the voice of the community on changes to Java which would make it
suitable for numeric-intensive applications, as well as a center of coordination
for the development of community supported class libraries and interfaces
for core numerical computations. The work of the group is described in
the Java Numerics web pages, http://math.nist.gov/javanumerics.
The JGF's second working group addresses issues of Parallel and Distributed
Computing.
The first JGF meeting was held in conjunction with the ACM 1998 Workshop
on Java for High-Performance Network Computing held at Stanford University
on Febrary 28 and March 1, 1998 with an attendance of about 200. Sun, Intel,
IBM, Visual Numerics, the MathWorks, Microsoft, Novell, Lucent, and Boeing
were among the industrial participants. At the workshop, Boisvert and Pozo
made a presentation entitled "Developing Numerical Libraries in Java."
A paper with this title, authored jointly with Karin Remington of NIST,
Pete Stewart of the University of Maryland (and NIST) and Jack Dongarra
of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, was included in the proceedings
and has been selected for inclusion in an upcoming issue of the journal
Concurrency, Practive and Experience. Boisvert made a similar presentation
at the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working
Group 2.5 on May 21 in Patras, Greece in order to elicit support from the
international community. WG 2.5 is the Numerical Software Working Group
of IFIP's Technical Committee 2 (TC 2) on Programming Languages.
The JGF Numerics Working Group is meeting approximately every two-three
months to advance its agenda as quickly as possible. A second workshop
was held in May and a third is scheduled in August. A formal report containing
the group's recommendations will be issued in early fall. The NIST team
is also working with the MathWorks Inc., developers of MATLAB, on a public
domain class library for numerical linear algebra. This library will be
proposed as a standard class library to the JGF.
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