Introduced commercially by Sun Microsystems in 1995, the Java programming language will be a teenager in 2008. Java has seen tremendous growth in its 13 years. Its design, ease-of-use, and most importantly its portability has made Java the fastest-growing programming language in computing history. Java.com says that Java today powers more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide.

From the beginning, Java was designed to be portable. Applications written in Java compile to the freely available Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the resulting application can run on any system that implements the JVM. This ability to run the same application on many hardware platforms has resulted in Java's increased popularity for Internet, gaming applications and devices like mobile phones and smart cards. However, this same portability and other technical limitations have restricted the market from considering Java as a viable language for compute-intensive, high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Java has historically been slow to load, start, and execute. If the primary goal of HPC applications is to show results as quickly as possible, Java and HPC are just not compatible.