A Methodology for Benchmarking Java Grande Applications

Increasing interest is being shown in the use of Java for large scale or Grande applications. This new use of Java places specific demands on the Java execution environments that could be tested and compared using a standard benchmark suite. EPCC has taken a leading role in the Java Grande Forum work to develop a framework and methodology for such a suite. Initial results presented here show interesting differences between JVMs, demonstrating the validity of the approach. Future work will concentrate on parallel benchmarks. 1 Introduction With the increasing ubiquity of Java comes a growing range of uses for the language that fall well outside its original design specifications. The use of Java for large scale applications with large memory, network or computational requirements, so called Grande applications, represent a clear example of this trend. Despite concerns about performance and numerical definitions an increasing number of users are taking seriously the possibility of usin..