Efficiently Adapting Java Binaries in Limited Memory Contexts

This paper presents a compilation framework that allows executable code to be shared across different Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instances. Current compliant JVMs for servers are burdened with large memory footprints (because of the size of the increasingly complicated compilers) and high startup costs, while compliant JVMs for embedded devices typically rely on interpretation. This paper describes a quasi-static approach that allows execution of a read-only version of the code, enabling compiled Java binaries to be embedded in ROM in an embedded environment or shared across multiple applications in a server environment. We have implemented this approach in the Quicksilver quasi-static compiler for the Jikes RVM (Jikes Research Virtual Machine). On the SPECjvm98 benchmark suite, our approach gives writable memory space savings of between 82–89% over that of our previous (non-sharable, non-ROMable) quasi-static approach, while delivering performance that is typically within 1–7% of that approach, and is competitive with the performance of the Jikes RVM adaptive optimization system.     

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.     

Structural Encoding of Static Single Assignment Form

Static Single Assignment (SSA) form is often used as an intermediate representation during code optimization in Java Virtual Machines. Recently, SSA has successfully been used for bytecode verification. However, constructing SSA at the code consumer is costly. SSA-based mobile code transport formats have been shown to eliminate this cost by shifting SSA creation to the code producer. These new formats, however, are not backward compatible with the established Java class-file format. We propose a novel approach to transport SSA information implicitly through structural code properties of standard Java bytecode. While the resulting bytecode sequence can still be directly executed by traditional Virtual Machines, our novel VM can infer SSA form and confirm its safety with virtually no overhead.     

Dynamic analysis of Java program concepts for visualization and profiling

Concept assignment identifies units of source code that are functionally related, even if this is not apparent from a syntactic point of view. Until now, the results of concept assignment have only been used for static analysis, mostly of program source code. This paper investigates the possibility of using concept information within a framework for dynamic analysis of programs. The paper presents two case studies involving a small Java program used in a previous research exercise, and a large Java virtual machine (the popular Jikes RVM system). These studies investigate two applications of dynamic concept information: visualization and profiling. The paper demonstrates two different styles of concept visualization, which show the proportion of overall time spent in each concept and the sequence of concept execution, respectively. The profiling study concerns the interaction between runtime compilation and garbage collection in Jikes RVM. For some benchmark cases, we are able to obtain a significant reduction in garbage collection time. We discuss how this phenomenon might be harnessed to optimize the scheduling of garbage collection in Jikes RVM.     

Ahead-of-time compilation of JavaScript programs

Modern virtual machines for JavaScript use just-in-time (JIT) compilation to produce binary code. JIT compilers cannot perform complex optimizations. In contrast, static compilation has unlimited capabilities for complex optimizing transformations, but it cannot be efficiently applied to dynamic languages, such as JavaScript. In this paper, a general approach to the ahead-of-time compilation of programs in dynamic languages is proposed, and this approach is used for improving two virtual machines JavaScript- Core and V8. In the implementation of the improved JavaScriptCore engine with ahead-of-time compilation, the specifics of using JavaScript programs as a part of locally stored applications for the ARM platform were taken into account. In the V8 engine for the x86-64 platform, the ahead-of-time compilation is implemented by caching an optimized internal representation in a separate file.     

Compilers for improved Java performance

Because they are interpreted, Java executables run slower than their compiled counterparts. The native executable translation (NET) compiler's objective is to optimize the translation of Java byte-code to native machine code so that it runs nearly as fast as native code generated directly from a source. The article presents some preliminary results for several large application programs and standard benchmarks. It compares the NET-compiled code performance with Sun's Java VM, Microsoft's Java just-in-time compiler, and equivalent C and C++ programs directly compiled. The results show that the optimizing NET compiler is capable of achieving better performance than the two other byte-code execution methods, in some cases achieving speeds comparable to directly compiled native code     

Jikes RVM动态编译技术分析与性能评测

随着Java语言的广泛应用,Java虚拟机的性能越来越受到人们重视,而虚拟机的动态编译技术是影响其性能的重要因素.Jikes RVM使用Java语言实现了一个Java虚拟机.首先分析了Jikes RVM的3个主要动态编译器的结构及其涉及的关键编译技术,包括基线编译、优化编译和自适应编译,然后利用SPECjvm Client98对Jikes RVM和Sun JVM的动态编译性能进行了测试和比较.测试结果显示,Jikes RVM的性能和Sun JVM性能基本相同,最后针对Jikes RVM的不足提出了改进Jikes RVM 编译器的方法.     

Efficient Register Mapping and Allocation in LaTTe, an Open-Source Java Just-in-Time Compiler

Java just-in-time (JIT) compilers improve the performance of a Java virtual machine (JVM) by translating Java bytecode into native machine code on demand. One important problem in Java JIT compilation is how to map stack entries and local variables to registers efficiently and quickly, since register-based computations are much faster than memory-based ones, while JIT compilation overhead is part of the whole running time. This paper introduces LaTTe, an open-source Java JIT compiler that performs fast generation of efficiently register-mapped RISC code. LaTTe first maps "all" local variables and stack entries into pseudoregisters, followed by real register allocation which also coalesces copies corresponding to pushes and pops between local variables and stack entries aggressively. Our experimental results indicate that LaTTe's sophisticated register mapping and allocation really pay off, achieving twice the performance of a naive JIT compiler that maps all local variables and stack entries to memory. It is also shown that LaTTe makes a reasonable trade-off between quality and speed of register mapping and allocation for the bytecode. We expect these results will also be beneficial to parallel and distributed Java computing: 1) by enhancing single-thread Java performance; and 2) by significantly reducing the number of memory accesses which the rest of the system must properly order to maintain coherence and keep threads synchronized     

一个基于混合并发模型的Java虚拟机

从解释执行到及时编译的转变极大地提高了Java程序的运行速度.但是,现有的Java虚拟机还有待进一步的改进.提出了一种新的Java虚拟机编译与执行模型--混合并发模型HCCEM(hybrid concurrent compilation and execution model).该模型通过多线程控制方式将字节码的编译与执行过程相重叠,从而获取加速的效果.另外还给出了基于HCCEM的Java虚拟机JAFFE的设计方案,并就实现中的执行模式切换、异常处理以及层次线程等问题进行了讨论.实验结果表明,HCCEM能     

基于程序约束的细粒度JVM测试程序约简方法

为了对Java虚拟机(JVM)进行测试,开发人员通常需要手工设计或利用测试生成工具生成复杂的测试程序,从而检测JVM中潜在的缺陷。然而,复杂的测试程序给开发人员定位及修复缺陷带来了极高的成本。测试程序约简技术旨在保障测试程序缺陷检测能力的同时,尽可能的删减测试程序中与缺陷检测无关的代码。现有研究工作基于Delta调试在C程序和XML输入上可以取得较好的约简效果,但是在JVM测试场景中,具有复杂语法和语义依赖关系的Java测试程序约减仍存在粒度较粗、约简效果较差的问题,导致约简后的程序理解成本依然很高。因此,针对具有复杂程序依赖关系的Java测试程序,本文提出一种基于程序约束的细粒度测试程序约简方法JavaPruner。首先在语句块级别设计细粒度的代码度量方法,随后在Delta调试技术上引入语句块之间的依赖约束关系来对测试程序进行约简。以Java字节码测试程序为实验对象,通过从现有的针对JVM测试的测试程序生成工具中筛选出具有复杂依赖关系的50个测试程序作为基准数据集,并在这些数据集上验证JavaPruner的有效性。实验结果表明,JavaPruner可以有效删减Java字节码测试程序中的冗余代码。与现有方法相比,在所有基准数据集上约减能力平均可提升37.7%。同时,JavaPruner可以在保障程序有效性及缺陷检测能力的同时将Java字节码测试程序最大约简至其原有大小的1.09% ,有效降低了测试程序的分析和理解成本。     

Runtime Engine for Dynamic Profile Guided Stride Prefetching

Stride prefetching is recognized as an important technique to improve memory access performance. The prior work usually profiles and/or analyzes the program behavior offline, and uses the identified stride patterns to guide the compilation process by injecting the prefetch instructions at appropriate places. There are some researches trying to enable stride prefetching in runtime systems with online profiling, but they either cannot discover cross-procedural prefetch opportunity, or require special supports in hardware or garbage collection. In this paper, we present a prefetch engine for JVM （Java Virtual Machine）. It firstly identifies the candidate load operations during just-in-time （JIT） compilation, and then instruments the compiled code to profile the addresses of those loads. The runtime profile is collected in a trace buffer, which triggers a prefetch controller upon a protection fault. The prefetch controller analyzes the trace to discover any stride patterns, then modifies the compiled code to inject the prefetch instructions in place of the instrumentations. One of the major advantages of this engine is that, it can detect striding loads in any virtual code places for both regular and irregular code, not being limited with plain loop or procedure scopes. Actually we found the cross-procedural patterns take about 30% of all the prefetchings in the representative Java benchmarks. Another major advantage of the engine is that it has runtime overhead much smaller （the maximal is less than 4.0%） than the benefits it brings. Our evaluation with Apache Harmony JVM shows that the engine can achieve an average 6.2% speed-up with SPECJVM98 and DaCapo on Intel Pentium 4 platform, in spite of the runtime overhead.     

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     

Design and implementation of Java just-in-time compiler

Early Java implementations relied on interpretation,leading to poor performance compared to compiled programs,Java just-in-time(JIT) compiler can compile Java programs at runtime,so it not only improves Java‘s performance prominently,but also preserves Java‘s portability.In this paper the design and implementing techniques of Java JIT complier based on Chinese open system are discussed in detail.To enhance the portability,a translating method which combines the static simulating method and macro expansion method is adopted.The optimization technique for JIT compiler is also discussed and a way to evaluate the hotspots in Java programs is presented.Experiments have been conducted to verify JIT compilation technique as an efficient way to accelerate Java.     

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.     

Mobile JikesRVM: A framework to support transparent Java thread migration

Today’s complex applications must face the distribution of data and code among different network nodes. Computation in distributed contexts is demanding increasingly powerful languages and execution environments, able to provide programmers with appropriate abstractions and tools. Java is a wide-spread language that allows developers to build complex software, even distributed, but it cannot handle the migration of computations (i.e. threads), due to intrinsic limitations of many traditional JVMs. After analyzing the approaches in the literature, this paper presents our thread migration framework (called Mobile JikesRVM), implemented on top of the IBM Jikes Research Virtual Machine (RVM): exploiting some of the innovative techniques in the JikesRVM, we implemented an extension of its scheduler that allows applications to easily capture the state of a running thread and makes it possible to restore it elsewhere (i.e. on a different hardware architecture or operating system), but still with a version of the framework installed). Our thread serialization mechanism provides support for both proactive and reactive migration, available also for multi-threaded Java applications, and tools to deal with the problems of resource relocation management. With respect to previous approaches, we implemented Mobile JikesRVM without recompiling its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) source code, but simply extending JikesRVM functionalities with a full Java package to be imported when thread migration is needed.     

Towards Language-Agnostic Mobile Code

The Java Virtual Machine is primarily designed for transporting Java programs. As a consequence, when JVM bytecodes are used to transport programs in other languages, the result becomes less acceptable the more the source language diverges from Java. Microsoft's .NET transport format fares better in this respect because it has a more flexible type system and instruction set, but it is not extensible, and (for example) has no provision for supporting explicit programmer-specified parallelism. Both platforms have difficulty making transported programs run efficiently.This paper discusses first steps towards mobile code representations that are independent (in the sense that the representation can be appropriately parameterized) of the source language (e.g., Java), intermediate representation (e.g., bytecode), and target architecture (e.g., x86). We call this kind of parameterizable framework language-agnostic.We present two techniques which provide parts of the envisioned language-agnostic functionality. Compressed abstract syntax trees as a wire format provide for a very dense encoding of programs at a high level of abstraction. We show how to parameterize the compression algorithm in a modular fashion with knowledge beyond the purely syntactical level. This leads to the notion of well-formedness by construction. The second technique defines the semantics of programs by mapping from abstract syntax trees to a typed core calculus representation. Based on this representation it becomes possible to use portable definitions of security policies and to execute programs written in different source languages, even if a more efficient trusted native compiler is not available on the target platform.     

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。     

Compiling Java just in time

The Java programming language promises portable, secure execution of applications. Early Java implementations relied on interpretation, leading to poor performance compared to compiled programs. Compiling Java programs to the native machine instructions provides much higher performance. Because traditional compilation would defeat Java's portability and security, another approach is necessary. This article describes some of the important issues related to just-in-time, or JIT, compilation techniques for Java. We focus on the JIT compilers developed by Sun for use with the JDK (Java Development Kit) virtual machine running on SPARC and Intel processors. (Access the Web at www.sun. com/workshop/java/jit for these compilers and additional information.) We also discuss performance improvements and limitations of JIT compilers. Future Java implementations may provide even better performance, and we outline some specific techniques that they may use     

PicoJava: a direct execution engine for Java bytecode

Key to the central promise inherent in Java technology-“write once, run anywhere”-is the fact that Java programs run on the Java virtual machine, insulating them from any contact with the underlying hardware. Consequently, Java programs must execute indirectly through a translation layer built into the Java virtual machine. Translation essentially converts Java virtual machine instructions (called bytecodes) into corresponding machine-specific binary instructions. Bytecode is a single image of a program that will execute identically (in principle) on any system equipped with a JVM. The first step toward the development of a new class of Java processors was the creation of the bytecode execution engine itself, called the picoJava core. PicoJava directly executes Java bytecode instructions and provides hardware support for other essential functions of the JVM. Executing bytecode instructions in hardware eliminates the need for dynamic translation, thus extending the useful range of Java bytecode programs to embedded environments. By the end of 1998, Java processors like Sun's microJava 701 should be available for evaluation from several licensees of the picoJava core technology