Integrating Existing Software Toolkits into VO System

Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers all around the world. A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and important task for the VO developers. VO architecture greatly depends on Grid and Web services, consequently the general VO integration route is "Java Ready - Grid Ready - VO Ready". In the paper, we discuss the importance of VO integration for existing toolkits and discuss the possible solutions. We introduce two efforts in the field from China-VO project, "gImageMagick" and " Galactic abundance gradients statistical research under grid environment". We also discuss what additional work should be done to convert Grid service to VO service.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, will be published in SPIE 2004 conference proceeding

Multi-Language Programming Environments for High Performance Java Computing

Recent developments in processor capabilities, software tools, programming languages and programming paradigms have brought about new approaches to high performance computing. A steadfast component of this dynamic evolution has been the scientific community's reliance on established scientific packages. As a consequence, programmers of high-performance applications are reluctant to embrace evolving languages such as Java. This paper describes the Java-to-C Interface (JCI) tool which provides application programmers wishing to use Java with immediate accessibility to existing scientific packages. The JCI tool also facilitates rapid development and reuse of existing code. These benefits are provided at minimal cost to the programmer. While beneficial to the programmer, the additional advantages of mixed-language programming in terms of application performance and portability are addressed in detail within the context of this paper. In addition, we discuss how the JCI tool is complementing other ongoing projects such as IBM's High-Performance Compiler for Java (HPCJ) and IceT's metacomputing environment

Multi-language programming environments for high performance Java computing

Recent developments in processor capabilities, software tools, programming languages and programming paradigms have brought about new approaches to high performance computing. A steadfast component of this dynamic evolution has been the scientific community's reliance on established scientific packages. As a consequence, programmers of high-performance applications are reluctant to embrace evolving languages such as Java. This paper describes the Java-to-C Interface (JCI) tool which provides application programmers wishing to use Java with immediate accessibility to existing scientific packages. The JCI tool also facilitates rapid development and reuse of existing code. These benefits are provided at minimal cost to the programmer. While beneficial to the programmer, the additional advantages of mixed-language programming in terms of application performance and portability are addressed in detail within the context of this paper. In addition, we discuss how the JCI tool is complementing other ongoing projects such as IBM's High-Performance Compiler for Java (HPCJ) and IceT's metacomputing environment