Rapid prototyping of a co-designed Java virtual machine

Virtual machines as an execution paradigm suffer in performance due to the extra layer of abstraction that is introduced. A possible new solution to relieve the performance penalty is to utilize a co-designed virtual machine that leverages the combined benefits of hardware and software. The feasibility of such an approach is an interesting challenge due to the complex nature of a virtual machine and its resource requirements to achieve performance gains. This paper discusses the process undertaken to prototype a co-designed virtual machine so as to rapidly determine its suitability. From this prototype a complete implementation of the hardware partition is developed. Several resource requirements determined from the process are highlighted in addition to an assessment of the process used.