Comparison of C and Java performance in finite element computations

The Java programming language has several features, which makes it attractive for software development in computational engineering and sciences. One major obstacle to use of Java in computationally intensive applications is its reputation of a slow language in comparison to Fortran or C. In this paper the performance of the developed Java finite element code is compared to that of the C code on the solution of three-dimensional elasticity problems. It is shown that simple code tuning can provide Java/C performance ratio 90% for the LDU solution of finite element equations. The PCG iterative solution algorithm is 1.5 times slower using the Java tuned code in comparison to the C code. We recommend using Java Virtual Machine (JVM) 1.2 since in many cases it is considerably faster in finite element computations than JVMs 1.3 and 1.4.