Based on conventional wisdom [1], one would argue against implementing the JiST system in Java, for performance reasons. In fact, the vast majority of existing simulation systems have been written in C and C++, or their derivatives. However, JiST actually out-performs the popular ns2 [13] and also the scalable GloMoSim [22] simulators, even on sequential benchmarks. Aggressive profile-driven optimizations combined with the latest Java runtimes result in a simulation system that can even match or exceed the performance of the highly-optimized Parsec [2] runtime! In this section, we present micro-benchmark results comparing JiST against other simulation systems.
The following measurements were taken on a 1133 MHz Intel Pentium III uni-processor machine with 128 MB of RAM and 512 KB of L2 cache, running the version 2.4.20 stock Redhat 9 Linux kernel with glibc v2.3. We used the publicly available versions of Java 2 JDK (v1.4.1), Parsec (v1.1.1), GloMoSim (v2.03) and ns2 (v2.26). All tests were also performed on a second machine - a more powerful and memory rich dual-processor - with identical absolute memory or relative throughput results.