The design and implementation of a modular and extensible Java virtual machine

  • Authors:

  • Patrick Doyle;Carlos Cavanna;Tarek S. Abdelrahman

  • Affiliations:

  • Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4;Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4;Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper describes the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a modular and extensible JavaTM Virtual Machine (JVM) infrastructure, called Jupiter. The infrastructure is intended to serve as a vehicle for our research on scalable JVM architectures for a cluster of PC workstations, with support for shared memory in software. Jupiter is constructed, using a building block architecture out of many modules with small, simple interfaces. This flexible structure, similar to UNIX® shells that build complex command pipelines out of discrete programs, allows the rapid prototyping of our research ideas by confining changes in JVM design to a small number of modules. In spite of this flexibility, Jupiter delivers good performance. Experimental evaluation of the current implementation of Jupiter using the SPECjvm98 and the EPCC Java Grande single-threaded and multithreaded benchmarks reflects competitive performance. Jupiter is on average about 2.5 times faster than Kaffe and about 2 times slower than the Sun Microsystems JDK (interpreter versions only). By providing a flexible JVM infrastructure that delivers competitive performance, we believe we have developed a framework that supports further research into JVM scalability.