Evaluating Java performance for linear algebra numerical computations

In this paper we evaluate the performance of a Java library in the context of designing numerical solutions for linear algebra problems. Nowadays there are a number of libraries like LAPACK or ATLAS available in C or FORTRAN for solving such problems. Java is a relatively new object-oriented language and is almost universally recognized as a very good programming language for writing portable programs. Despite these advantages, it is a common believe that Java still lags behind C/C++ or Fortran performance especially for computational intensive numerical applications. We developed a Java library for matrix computations and show that using a set of optimization techniques Java can achieve performance comparable with other libraries developed in C or Fortran.