Particular Conclusions

• mpiJava provides a fully functional and efficient Java interface to MPI.
• Our performance tests have shown that, in terms of communication speeds, WMPI on NT outperforms MPICH on Solaris.
• When used for distributed computing the current implementation of mpiJava does not impose a huge overhead on top of the native MPI interface.
• We have discovered some of the limitations in the usage fo JNI. In particular with MPICH where we had problems with UNIX signals. We are hopeful that these problems will disappear when we start using JDK 1.2 and native threads.
• Our performance tests indicate that much of the additional latency that mpiJava imposes is due to the relatively poor performance of the JVM rather than the impact of messages of traversing additional software layers.
• The syntax of mpiJava is easy to understand and use, thus making it relatively simple for programmers with either a Java or scientific background to take up.
• We believe that mpiJava will also provide a popular means for teaching students the fundamentals of parallel programming with MPI.