Java Grande: software infrastructure for HPCC

We describe the definition, motivation and current status of Java Grande activities. We introduce 3 roles of Java in Grande programming at client, middleware or backend tiers of a computing system. We start with Java as a language and describe where it is clearly good and where it could be good! The Java Grande Forum has numerical and distributed computing working groups and projects include the study of changes to Java and its runtime to enhance Grande applications and their programming environment community. There is an important activity to define seamless interfaces allowing universal access to general hosts. Benchmarks for all sorts of Grande applications are critical. We discuss Java for Parallel Computing including message passing (MPI) and data parallelism.