Java Support Packages and Benchmarks for Multi-core Processors

This paper presents Java support packages that help optimize the program performance by improving the coordination with the underlying software and hardware (operating system and CPU). The software support exports low-level information about processor features (cache sizes and sharing, number of logical CPUs per chip/core, Simultaneous Multi-Threading, etc) to the application level and addresses issues such as CPU/interrupt affinity, thread scheduling and synchronization. The paper also shows how to use the support packages to develop micro-benchmarks for Java VMs and Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) implementations running on multi-core CPUs. A benchmark suite consisting of memory, asynchronous event handling (for RTSJ implementations only) and locking tests is described and evaluated on Java and Jamaica VM [15].