Oracle floats Java hardware acceleration proposal

From InfoWorld: A proposal currently floating in the Java community would use hardware acceleration to improve bulk calculations in the platform.

Project Trinity would explore enhancing execution of bulk aggregate calculations over Streams by offloading calculations to hardware accelerators. Streams in Java allow developers to express calculations so that data parallelism can be efficiently exploited, and the Stream capability in Java Standard Edition 8 is for processing data declaratively while leveraging multicore architectures.

"Such calculations are prime candidates for leveraging enhanced data-oriented instructions on CPUs, such as SIMD instructions or offloading to hardware accelerators, such as the SPARC Data Accelerator co-processor," said Karthik Ganesan, from Oracle's performance and applications engineering group, in his proposal made Friday in an email-based OpenJDK discussion forum.

The project would explore how libraries like Streams can be enhanced to use data processing hardware features for more efficient processing. Success would be measured based on improved speed and resource efficiency for a range of calculations under offload, ease of hardware acceleration, and ensuring there's no time or space overhead for non-accelerated calculations.

View: Article @ Source Site