Done with GCJ: improved simulation performance

Wed Jun 28 10:41:00 GMT 2000

We've used gcj to improve the performance of simulations written for
the Swarm simulator.
Swarm ( http://www.swarm.org ) is a fine-grained distributed discrete
event simulator. Swarm is mainly used for agent-based (bottom-up) modeling. 
Swarm is not written in Java, but we have a JNI layer. We did it with JNI
at first for portability. And, since the simulator is not
implemented in C++, we didn't expect to see major benefits from CNI...
The configuration that we've tested is Kaffe as equipped with gcj
support. On Intel Debian 2.2, we've seen performance gains up to 30%
over Kaffe's jit3. Unfortunately, this configuration is quite fragile,
so we can't yet deploy gcj to our users.