CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Portable Performance for Parallel Managed Languages Across the Many-Core Spectrum

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Computers with many tens to hundreds of ?cores? are on their way, but programming languages and toolsthat exploit them well have lagged. At the same time, there are emerging programming languages intendedfor writing programs to run on these computers. These languages, such as X10 and Fortress, add support fornew concepts that make it easier to write many-core programs, but there does not yet exist good compiler andrun-time support for these languages. Systems that run Java, namely Java virtual machines such as those thatrun on virtually every laptop, desktop, and server today, supply much of what the new languages need, butfall short in some important ways. In particular they do not provide for saying in which part of memory toplace particular objects, on which core to run which computations, easy ways to get all cores busy workingon different parts of a big piece of data, or for synchronizing and getting right all the data manipulationshappening at the same time. This project is extending an existing research Java virtual machine (JikesRVM) with support for many ways of doing the things that the new languages need in order to run wellon many-core computers. The primary goal is to devise extensions to standard Java virtual machines forthis new world, and to make it possible for many others to experiment with different ways of implementingthese extensions, thus leveraging the creativity of the whole community of language and virtual machineresearchers. Secondary goals include offering reasonably good initial implementations of virtual machineextensions as a starting point for future research and development, and proposing specific extensions to theJava virtual machine specification standard.