A Hardware-Software Integrated Design for a High-Performance Java Processor

Today object-oriented programming (OOP) is becoming more and more popular than ever, due to Internet and network computing, and need for resource sharing. Java becomes attractive because of its appealing features such as platform independence and code reusability. However, Java has lower performance than conventional programming languages due to its real-time execution overheads in the layer of Java Virtual Machine (JVM). With increasing performance through higher clock speed or multi-cores, software virtual machines are still needed to run on top of the operating system to execute Java, reducing the effect of the hardware performance improvements. This research proposes a high-performance computer architecture with hybrid system co-design for Java processing. Our FPGA model implemented in VHDL, jHISC, originates hardware support for object-oriented bytecodes, object referencing and method invocation. Moreover, baseline compiler is developed to construct the core structure and to ensure the architecture compatible to the JVM specifications. The project is at present version 4, which is target for mobile and embedded computing. Comparing with the products by Sun Microsystems through evaluation based on SPEC JVM98 benchmark, jHISC V4.0 provide overall performance gain of around 137% over HotSpot JVM and 102% to 1351% over picoJava II.