Bug#588562: ITP: colt -- libraries for High Performance Scientific and Technical Computing in Java

[Shaun Jackman <sjackman@gmail.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

Package name: colt
Version: 1.2.0
Upstream author: colt@listbox.cern.ch
URL: http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/
License: other
Description: libraries for High Performance Scientific and Technical
Computing in Java
Scientific and technical computing, as, for example, carried out at
CERN, is characterized by demanding problem sizes and a need for high
performance at reasonably small memory footprint. There is a
perception by many that the Java language is unsuited for such work.
However, recent trends in its evolution suggest that it may soon be a
major player in performance sensitive scientific and technical
computing. For example, IBM Watson's Ninja project showed that Java
can indeed perform BLAS matrix computations up to 90% as fast as
optimized Fortran. The Java Grande Forum Numerics Working Group
provides a focal point for information on numerical computing in Java.
With the performance gap steadily closing, Java has recently found
increased adoption in the field. The reasons include ease of use,
cross-platform nature, built-in support for multi-threading, network
friendly APIs and a healthy pool of available developers. Still, these
efforts are to a significant degree hindered by the lack of foundation
toolkits broadly available and conveniently accessible in C and
Fortran.