Heterogeneous programming with Java: gourmet blend or just a hill of beans?

The heterogeneous parallel processing community has long been struggling to bring its approach to computation into the mainstream. One major impediment is that no popular programming language supports a sufficiently wide range of models of parallelism. The recent emergence of Java as a popular programming language may offer an opportunity to change this situation. The article begins with a review of the special linguistic and computational needs of heterogeneous parallel processing by considering the user communities that would benefit most from the approach. It then reviews the pros and cons of Java as a language for expressing and realizing heterogeneity, and concludes with some possible changes that would make Java more suitable for such use