Speaker:

Ken Kent

Talk Title:

“A MicroJIT Compiler for OMR”

Wednesday March 25, 2024

Bahen Centre for Information Technology, BA 5256

This lecture is open to the public. No registration is required, but space is limited.

Abstract:

Eclipse OMR provides a common generic framework for supporting applications across multiple runtime languages and platforms. So as not to sacrifice performance for portability, Just-in-Time (JIT) compilers operate in the background of the managed runtime to identify critical areas that operate frequently, and compile them into machine code. However, JITs themselves can use significant resources and introduce a startup delay. In response, we developed in collaboration with IBM a lightweight, template-based MicroJIT to provide faster startup with reduced memory consumption, making it ideal for an Embedded OMR environment. The project supports a hybrid environment whereby MicroJIT handles the startup phase and the default optimizing JIT takes over for longer running, highly utilized code. In this talk, we present the design and performance evaluation of template-based JIT compiler in OpenJ9. We use the DaCapo benchmark suite to measure the execution times of applications under different workloads and a custom Java application to calculate Fibonacci series for microbenchmarking. Our results show that the template-based JIT compilations in OpenJ9 improve the performance of Java applications by execution times speed-up and provide a baseline for future research on JIT compilations.

About Ken Kent:

Dr. Kenneth Kent is the Barrett Chair in Entrepreneurship for Digital Innovation, Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies – Atlantic and Professor with the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He is also a co-founder of anessa and ASETS-CA, two companies that provide software solutions for the engineering industry. Dr. Kent is also an Honorary Professor within the Department of Computer Science at the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin, Germany. He has authored over 200 publications with a number of these publications receiving recognition of Best Paper awards. Dr. Kent’s research in digital infrastructure, specifically in computer runtime technology and in computer-aided hardware design, has tremendous and pervasive impact. His long-running collaboration with IBM in runtime technologies has produced advances that are found in IBM computer servers worldwide. Dr.Kent also conducts research on the computer-aided design of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, a platform for building bespoke hardware for efficient embedded computation. His research has produced key components of a long-running open source CAD flow, which has now been adopted as the industry standard for FPGA CAD software by the Linux Foundation “Chips Alliance” led by Google and other key industry partners.