A parallel dynamic compiler for CIL bytecode

ABSTRACT

Multi-core technology is being employed in most recent high-performance architectures. Such architectures need specifically designed multi-threaded software to exploit all the potentialities of their hardware parallelism.

At the same time, object code virtualization technologies are achieving a growing popularity, as they allow higher levels of software portability and reuse.

Thus, a virtual execution environment running on a multi-core processor has to run complex, high-level applications and to exploit as much as possible the underlying parallel hardware. We propose an approach that leverages on CMP features to expose a novel pipeline synchronization model for the internal threads of the dynamic compiler.

Thanks to compilation latency masking effect of the pipeline organization, our dynamic compiler, ILDJIT, is able to achieve significant speedups (26% on average) with respect to the baseline, when the underlying hardware exposes at least two cores.

REFERENCES

• 1: http://ildjit.sourceforge.net.
• 2: Bea jrockit: Java for the enterprise technical white paper, 2006.
• 3: Andrew W. Appel, Modern compiler implementation in Java, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1997
• 4: David F. Bacon , Susan L. Graham , Oliver J. Sharp, Compiler transformations for high-performance computing, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.26 n.4, p.345-420, Dec. 1994 [doi>10.1145/197405.197406]
• 5: Hans-Juergen Boehm , Mark Weiser, Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment, Software—Practice & Experience, v.18 n.9, p.807-820, September 1988 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380180902]
• 6: Michal Cierniak , Marsha Eng , Neal Glew , Brian Lewis , James Stichnoth, The Open Runtime Platform: a flexible high-performance managed runtime environment: Research Articles, Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience, v.17 n.5-6, p.617-637, April 2005 [doi>10.1002/cpe.v17:5/6]
• 7: Evelyn Duesterwald. Dynamic compilation. In Y. N. Srikant and Priti Shankar, editors, The Compiler Design Handbook --- Optimizations and Machine Code Generation, pages 739--761. CRC Press, 2003.
• 8: ECMA, Rue du Rhone 114 CH-1204 Geneva. Standard ECMA-335 Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), 3rd edition, June 2005.
• 9: Nicu G. Fruja and Egon Borger. Analysis of the .net clr exception handling mechanism. In Proceedings of the 2005 .NET Technologies Conference, 2005.
• 10: Java grande forum. http://www.javagrande.org/.
• 11: Chandra Krintz, David Grove, Vivek Sarkar, and Brad Calder. Reducing the overhead of dynamic compilation. Softw., Pract. Exper., 31(8):717--738, 2001.
• 12: Prasad Kulkarni , Matthew Arnold , Michael Hind, Dynamic compilation: the benefits of early investing, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Virtual execution environments, June 13-15, 2007, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1254810.1254824]
• 13: J. A. Mathew , P. D. Coddington , K. A. Hawick, Analysis and development of Java Grande benchmarks, Proceedings of the ACM 1999 conference on Java Grande, p.72-80, June 12-14, 1999, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/304065.304101]
• 14: Mark Mitchell , Alex Samuel, Advanced Linux Programming, New Riders Publishing, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2001
• 15: B. Ramakrishna Rau, Levels of representation of programs and the architecture of universal host machines, Proceedings of the 11th annual workshop on Microprogramming, p.67-79, November 19-22, 1978, Pacific Grove, California, United States
• 16: Southern Storm Software. http://www.southern-storm.com.au. DotGNU Portable .NET project.
• 17: Southern Storm Software. http://www.southern-storm.com.au/libjit.html. Libjit project.
• 18: W. Richard Stevens, UNIX network programming, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1990
• 19: Vijay Sundaresan , Daryl Maier , Pramod Ramarao , Mark Stoodley, Experiences with Multi-threading and Dynamic Class Loading in a Java Just-In-Time Compiler, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, p.87-97, March 26-29, 2006 [doi>10.1109/CGO.2006.16]
• 20: Alfred V. Aho , Monica S. Lam , Ravi Sethi , Jeffrey D. Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2006
• 21: Paul R. Wilson, Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Memory Management, p.1-42, September 17-19, 1992

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Compilers

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.2 Modes of Computation
          Subjects: Parallelism and concurrency
  F.4 MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
      F.4.2 Grammars and Other Rewriting Systems
          Subjects: Grammar types (e.g., context-free, context-sensitive); Parallel rewriting systems (e.g., developmental systems, L-systems)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Theory

Keywords:
dynamic compilation, parallel virtual machine, virtual execution system