Virtual Machine and Bytecode for Optimization on Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

We present a description of a virtual machine and byte code that have been designed around the goal of optimized execution on highly variable, heterogeneous hardware, instead of having goals such as small byte codes as was the objective of the Java Virtual Machine. The approach used here is to combine elements of the Dalvik virtual machine with concepts from the Open CL heterogeneous computing platform, along with an annotation system so that the results of complex compile time analysis can be available to the Just-In-Time compiler. We provide a flexible annotation format so that the set of annotations can be expanded as the field of heterogeneous computing continues to grow.