Evaluation of Java for General Purpose GPU Computing

Abstract

The presence of many-core units as accelerators has been increasing due to their ability to improve the performance of highly parallel workloads. General Purpose GPU(GPGPU) computing has allowed the graphical units to emerge as successful co-processors that can be employed to improve the performance of many different non-graphical applications with high parallel requirements, which make them suitable for many High Performance Computing workloads. While the main libraries developed to exploit the massive parallel capacity of GPUs are oriented to C/C++ programmers, there have been several efforts to extend this support to other languages. Among them, Java stands out for being one of the most extended languages and there are multiple projects that try to enable Java to take advantage of GPGPU computing. In this scenario, this paper presents an evaluation of the most relevant among the current solutions that exploit GPGPU computing in Java.