Interactive Simulations on the Web: Compiling NESL into Java

Jonathan C. Hardwick, Girija J. Narlikar and Jay Sipelstein
Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Vol.9(11):1075-1089, Nov 1997.

140k compressed postscript / PDF

Abstract: We motivate and describe the design and implementation of a system for compiling the high-level programming language NESL into Java. As well as increasing the portability of NESL, this system has enabled us to make existing simulations and algorithm animations available in applet form on the web. We present performance results showing that current Java virtual machines running the generated code achieve about half the performance of a native implementation of NESL. We conclude that the use of Java as an intermediate language is a viable way to improve the portability of existing high-level programming languages for scientific simulation and computation.

An initial version was published in the ACM 1997 Workshop on Java for Science and Engineering Computation.

@article{ hardwick97interactive,
    author = "Jonathan C. Hardwick and Girija Narlikar and Jay Sipelstein",
    title = "Interactive simulations on the {Web}: compiling {NESL} into {Java}",
    journal = "Concurrency: Practice and Experience",
    volume = "9",
    number = "11",
    pages = "1075--1089",
    year = "1997",
    url = "citeseer.nj.nec.com/hardwick97interactive.html" }

Some applets generated from existing Nesl programs.