CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Portable Performance for Parallel Managed Languages Across the Many-Core Spectrum

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Computers with many tens to hundreds of ?cores? are on their way, but programming languages and tools that exploit them well have lagged. At the same time, there are emerging programming languages intended for writing programs to run on these computers. These languages, such as X10 and Fortress, add support for new concepts that make it easier to write many-core programs, but there does not yet exist good compiler and run-time support for these languages. Systems that run Java, namely Java virtual machines such as those that run on virtually every laptop, desktop, and server today, supply much of what the new languages need, but fall short in some important ways. In particular they do not provide for saying in which part of memory to place particular objects, on which core to run which computations, easy ways to get all cores busy working on different parts of a big piece of data, or for synchronizing and getting right all the data manipulations happening at the same time. This project is extending an existing research Java virtual machine (Jikes RVM) with support for many ways of doing the things that the new languages need in order to run well on many-core computers. The primary goal is to devise extensions to standard Java virtual machines for this new world, and to make it possible for many others to experiment with different ways of implementing these extensions, thus leveraging the creativity of the whole community of language and virtual machine researchers. Secondary goals include offering reasonably good initial implementations of virtual machine extensions as a starting point for future research and development, and proposing specific extensions to the Java virtual machine specification standard.