Compiling lazy functional programs to Java bytecode

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was designed as the target for Java compilers, but there is no reason why it cannot be used as the target for other languages. We describe the implementation of a compiler which translates a lazy, weakly‐typed functional program into Java class files. We compare the performance of our compiler to the only other known compiler from a lazy functional language to the JVM. The results are broadly similar, suggesting that to get a significant performance speed‐up using this compilation paradigm will come only from increasing the performance of the JVM, rather than enhancing the compiler itself. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EJVM: an economic Java run‐time environment for embedded devices

As network‐enabled embedded devices and Java grow in their popularity, embedded system researchers start seeking ways to make these devices Java‐enabled. However, it is a challenge to apply Java technology to these devices due to their shortage of resources. In this paper, we propose EJVM (Economic Java Virtual Machine), an economic way to run Java programs on network‐enabled and resource‐limited embedded devices. Espousing the architecture proposed by distributed JVM, we store all Java codes on the server to reduce the storage needs of the client devices. In addition, we use two novel techniques to reduce the client‐side memory footprints: server‐side class representation conversion and on‐demand bytecode loading. Finally, we maintain client‐side caches and provide performance evaluation on different caching policies. We implement EJVM by modifying a freely available JVM implementation, Kaffe. From the experiment results, we show that EJVM can reduce Java heap requirements by about 20–50% and achieve 90% of the original performance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A practical method for specification and analysis of exceptionhandling-a Java/JVM case study

We provide a rigorous framework for language and platform independent design and analysis of exception handling mechanisms in modern programming languages and their implementations. To illustrate the practicality of the method we develop it for the exception handling mechanism of Java and show that its implementation on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Is correct. For this purpose we define precise abstract models for exception handling in Java and in the JVM and define a compilation scheme of Java to JVM code which allows us to prove that, in corresponding runs, Java and the JVM throw the same exceptions and with equivalent effect. Thus, the compilation scheme can, with reasonable confidence, be used as a standard reference for Java exception handling compilation     

Initialization problems for Java

We reveal a grey area in the specification of Java and of its implementation through the Java Virtual Machine (JVM): the treatment of initialization of classes and interfaces. We report the results of our experiments with different implementations of Java, which confirm the theoretical prediction of our work on mathematical models for Java [4] and the JVM [3], namely that the designers of Java and the JVM have used notions of initialization which do not match and which afflict the portability of Java programs. We also show that concurrent initialization may deadlock and that various current Java compilers violate the initialization semantics through standard optimization techniques.     

Ada-Java编译器的研究与设计

Ｊａｖａ语言是近几年地出现的一种面向对象网络语言。     

一种新的Java存储模型L-JMM

Java存储模型是Java语言和Java虚拟机研究中的核心关键部分,目前Java语言规范中的存储模型不能保证Java技术所必需的语义特性,而且不利于Java虚拟机的性能优化.提出了一种新的Java存储模型,该模型取消了规范中Java存储模型中对存储密致性的要求,保证了Location一致性;同时根据Java语义的要求,对Java语言中不同类型的变量详细规定了多线程存储操作的行为规则.该模型不仅能保证Java程序的正确性,同时能有效提高Java程序的运行效率.最后通过仿真实验验证了该存储模型的关键特性.     

Formalization and Analysis of Class Loading in Java

Since Java security relies on the type-safety of the JVM, many formal approaches have been taken in order to prove the soundness of the JVM. This paper presents a new formalization of the JVM and proves its soundness. It is the first model to employ dynamic linking and bytecode verification to analyze the loading constraint scheme of Java2. The key concept required for proving the soundness of the new model is augmented value typing, which is defined from ordinary value typing combined with the loading constraint scheme. In proving the soundness of the model, it is shown that there are some problems inside the current reference implementation of the JVM with respect to our model. We also analyze the findClass scheme, newly introduced in Java2. The same analysis also shows why applets cannot exploit the type-spoofing vulnerability reported by Saraswat, which led to the introduction of the loading constraint scheme.     

面向MHP的嵌入式Java虚拟机的移植与优化

为了增强MHP机顶盒的网络交互能力，必须构建Java运行环境。该文介绍了Java技术、MHP机顶盒软件结构模型、嵌入式Java虚拟机(JVM)概念以及开源Java虚拟机——Kaffe的软件层次结构，阐述了Kaffe在ALI公司数字电视机顶盒开发平台上移植的实现过程，提出了在嵌入式环境下，Java虚拟机执行引擎的性能优化策略。实际运行结果证明了JVM的移植性和性能优化策略的可行性。     

Java虚拟机性能及调优

性能问题一直是Java无法回避的一个弱点。然而造成性能低下的原因除了Java本身的原因外,很多时候是由于应用没有优化地使用Java造成的。虚拟机是Java平台的核心,研究Java虚拟机(Java virtual machine,简称JVM)的关键技术及运行机制,并分析其性能优化措施,使Java在不同的平台上顺利运行,为编程实现JVM或向各种平台移植JVM提供参考。     

JaRec: a portable record/replay environment for multi‐threaded Java applications

This paper describes JaRec, a portable record/replay system for Java. It correctly replays multi‐threaded, data‐race free Java applications, by recording the order of synchronization operations, and by executing them in the same order during replay. The record/replay infrastructure is developed in Java, and does not require a modification of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) if it provides the JVM Profiler Interface (JVMPI). If the JVM does not support JVMPI, which is used for intercepting the loaded classes, only a minor modification to the JVM is required in order to run the system. On ystems with limited memory resources, JaRec can be executed in a distributed fashion. This also makes it suitable to aid debugging of multi‐threaded applications on embedded systems. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Characterizing and optimizing Java-based HPC applications on Intel many-core architecture

The increasing demand for performance has stimulated the wide adoption of many-core accelerators like Intel^® Xeon Phi^TM Coprocessor, which is based on Intel’s Many Integrated Core architecture. While many HPC applications running in native mode have been tuned to run efficiently on Xeon Phi, it is still unclear how a managed runtime like JVM performs on such an architecture. In this paper, we present the first measurement study of a set of Java HPC applications on Xeon Phi under JVM. One key obstacle to the study is that there is currently little support of Java for Xeon Phi. This paper presents the result based on the first porting of OpenJDK platform to Xeon Phi, in which the HotSpot virtual machine acts as the kernel execution engine. The main difficulty includes the incompatibility between Xeon Phi ISA and the assembly library of Hotspot VM. By evaluating the multithreaded Java Grande benchmark suite and our ported Java Phoenix benchmarks, we quantitatively study the performance and scalability issues of JVM on Xeon Phi and draw several conclusions from the study. To fully utilize the vector computing capability and hide the significant memory access latency on the coprocessor, we present a semi-automatic vectorization scheme and software prefetching model in HotSpot. Together with 60 physical cores and tuning, our optimized JVM achieves averagely 2.7x and 3.5x speedup compared to Xeon CPU processor by using vectorization and prefetching accordingly. Our study also indicates that it is viable and potentially performance-beneficial to run applications written for such a managed runtime like JVM on Xeon Phi.     

Java动态类加载机制分析及其应用

Java 虚拟机(JVM)中的类加载机制可以在 Java 应用程序运行期间动态加载类文件, 而不影响其它功能模块的正常运行. 通过对 Java 类加载器的层次体系结构, 动态类加载机制原理、实现过程进行分析, 将Java动态类加载机制应用到高校网站管理平台的文件发布模块中, 使得设计好的静态网页和后台管理系统相关联, 通过自定义加载器来加载加密过的Java类文件. 这样以可插拔的方式快速的部署二级网站, 增强了网站管理平台的灵活性和可扩展性.     

Portable virtual cycle accounting for large-scale distributed cycle sharing systems

CPU cycle sharing among distributed heterogeneous computers is the key function in large-scale volunteer computing and desktop grid applications. One important problem in large-scale distributed cycle sharing system is how to account for the amount of computation work performed by a CPU cycle provider, in a uniform and portable fashion across heterogeneous hardware and operating system platforms. Such an accounting mechanism is especially desirable when CPU resources are traded and a lack of uniform workload accounting will hinder the enforcement of market-driven CPU pricing/trading policies in distributed cycle sharing systems. Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has proved to be a good match for distributed cycle sharing because of its abilities to run applications on a wide variety of platforms without modification (portability) and to host untrusted applications (safety). In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an efficient, application-transparent virtual cycle accounting scheme integrated into JVM. Our scheme achieves portable workload accounting across heterogeneous computing platforms by accounting for JVM virtual instructions instead of real processor cycles. Different from the existing JVM CPU accounting mechanisms that involve bytecode rewriting, our scheme is transparent to applications and does not require visible changes to application and library code interfaces which would break applications that use Reflection API. Moreover, our scheme is efficient via the use of processor registers for accounting. Our experimental results demonstrate both high accounting accuracy and low runtime overhead of virtual cycle accounting.     

Java in high performance environments

Java programs are executed by a Java virtual machine (JVM), which interprets intermediate compiled bytecode that is nominally platform independent. Although early versions of Java interpreted unoptimized bytecode in a relatively unsophisticated manner, recent developments including static analysis, just-in-time compilation, JVM optimization, and instruction-level optimizations have improved execution efficiency. Consequently, Java is now competitive with C and C++ for some applications and on some platforms. Despite Java's increasing popularity, there is a lingering perception that deficiencies in the language make it unsuitable for high-performance computing. In this paper we address some of those deficiencies and discuss the suitability of using Java in a distributed environment.     

On the design of global object space for efficient multi-threading Java computing on clusters

The popularity of Java and recent advances in compilation and execution technology for Java are making the language one of the preferred ones in the field of high-performance scientific and engineering computing. A distributed Java Virtual Machine supports transparent parallel execution of multi-threaded Java programs on a cluster of computers. It provides an alternative platform for high-performance scientific computations. In this paper, we present the design of a global object space for a distributed JVM. It virtualizes a single Java object heap across machine boundaries to facilitate transparent object accesses. We leverage runtime object connectivity information to detect distributed shared objects (DSOs) that are reachable from threads at different nodes to facilitate efficient memory management in the distributed JVM. Based on the concept of DSO, we propose a framework to characterize object access patterns, along three orthogonal dimensions. With this framework, we are able to effectively calibrate the runtime memory access patterns and dynamically apply optimized cache coherence protocols to minimize consistency maintenance overhead. The optimization devices include an object home migration method that optimizes the single-writer access pattern, synchronized method migration that allows the execution of a synchronized method to take place remotely at the home node of its locked object, and connectivity-based object pushing that uses object connectivity information to optimize the producer–consumer access pattern. Several benchmark applications in scientific computing have been tested on our distributed JVM. We report the performance results and give an in-depth analysis of the effects of the proposed adaptive solutions.     

JBInsTrace: A tracer of Java and JRE classes at basic-block granularity by dynamically instrumenting bytecode

Understanding what happens during the runtime of a Java program is difficult. Tracking runtime flow can bring valuable information for program understanding and behavior analysis. Polymorphism, thread concurrency or even simple facts like the number of method invocations and the number of executed bytecodes are valuable information to track, but are difficult to compute outside the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on running programs. In this paper, we present JBInsTrace, a new tool that instruments and traces Java bytecode. It produces static information about source code and a very fine grained trace of Java software execution, combining them to allow detailed analysis of the runtime. Our tool differs from others because it does not only trace program classes but also JRE classes, and does so at basic block level, without altering the JVM and without statically modifying class files. We explain JBInsTrace design, focused towards efficiency, which results in reasonable performance penalty.     

Java heap protection for debugging native methods

Java virtual machine (JVM) crashes are often due to an invalid memory reference to the JVM heap. Before the bug that caused the invalid reference can be fixed, its location must be identified. It can be in either the JVM implementation or the native library written in C invoked from Java applications. To help system engineers identify the location, we implemented a feature using page protection that prevents threads executing native methods from referring to the JVM heap. This feature protects the JVM heap during native method execution; if the heap is referred to invalidly, it interrupts the execution by generating a page-fault exception. It then reports the location where the exception was generated. The runtime overhead for using this feature depends on the frequency of native method calls because the protection is switched on each time a native method is called. We evaluated the runtime overhead by running the SPECjvm98, SPECjbb2000, VolanoMark, and JFCMark benchmark suites on a PC with two Intel Xeon^® 1.6 GHz processors. The performance loss was less than 2% for the benchmark items that do not call native methods so frequently (10⁴ times per second) and 5%–20% for the benchmark items that do (10⁴–10⁵ times per second). The worst performance loss was 54%, which was recorded for a benchmark item that calls native methods 2.0×10⁶ times per second.     

基于Java存储机制的应用研究

内存是影响系统性能的关键因素之一。通过分析JVM存储架构以及数据对象在Java存储空间的实际分配机制,提出利用最佳编程方式及优化内存来改善内存效率、提高系统性能的方法,并以实例说明存储管理机制在Java应用程序中的具体实现。     

Workload characterization of JVM languages

Originally developed with a single language in mind, the JVM is now targeted by numerous programming languages—its automatic memory management, just‐in‐time compilation, and adaptive optimizations—making it an attractive execution platform. However, the garbage collector, the just‐in‐time compiler, and other optimizations and heuristics were designed primarily with the performance of Java programs in mind. Consequently, many of the languages targeting the JVM, and especially the dynamically typed languages, are suffering from performance problems that cannot be simply solved at the JVM side. In this article, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the character of the workloads imposed on the JVM by both dynamically typed and statically typed JVM languages. To this end, we introduce a new set of dynamic metrics for workload characterization, along with an easy‐to‐use toolchain to collect the metrics. We apply the toolchain to applications written in six JVM languages (Java, Scala, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, and JavaScript) and discuss the findings. Given the recently identified importance of inlining for the performance of Scala programs, we also analyze the inlining behavior of the HotSpot JVM when executing bytecode originating from different JVM languages. As a result, we identify several traits in the non‐Java workloads that represent potential opportunities for optimization. © 2015 The Authors. Software: Practice and Experience Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.