Runtime optimizations for a Java DSM implementation

Jackal is a fine-grained distributed shared memory implementation of the Java programming language. Jackal implements Java’s memory model and allows multithreaded Java programs to run unmodified on distributed-memory systems. This paper focuses on Jackal’s runtime system, which implements a multiple-writer, home-based consistency protocol. Protocol actions are triggered by software access checks that Jackal’s compiler inserts before object and array references. To reduce access-check overhead, the compiler exploits source-level information and performs extensive static analysis to optimize, lift, and remove access checks. We describe optimizations for Jackal’s runtime system, which mainly consist of discovering opportunities to dispense with flushing of cached data. We give performance results for different runtime optimizations, and compare their impact with the impact of one compiler optimization. We find that our runtime optimizations are necessary for good Jackal perfo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: JAVA
• Authors: Ronald Veldema, Rutger F. H. Hofman, Raoul Bhoedjang, Henri E. Bal
• Keywords: Jackal, Jackal Implements Java, Jackal’s Runtime System, JAVA 2001, Programming Languages