At the last JavaOne I did a walk-on talk during the AMD keynote where I talked about how incredible HotSpot's performance had become - beating the best C compilers. I ended my talk with a joking comment that "the next target is Fortran". Afterwards, Denis Caromel of Inria came up to me and said "you're already there". He and some colleges had been working on some comparisons between Java and Fortran for HPC. Their final report Current State of Java for HPC has been made available as a Tech Report and makes pretty interesting reading. There are a lot of HPC micro benchmarks in it which look great. Thanks!