Thread-level parallel execution in co-designed virtual machines

Abstract

Virtual machine technology is becoming more important as the use of non-heterogeneous computer networks have become more widespread. However, the runtime performance of an application running on a virtual machine is significantly below that of the same application running as a native executable on a given platform. Previous work shows that a hardware/software co-designed virtual machine can provide a performance improvement. This paper describes research work to further improve the performance of the co-designed virtual machine by adding thread-level parallel execution. The design put forward adds the functionality to support independent scheduling of threads in the hardware and software partitions of the co-designed virtual machine. A prototype of the design, based on the Java virtual machine, utilizing software simulation has been constructed and tested. The results of this testing show that the design is feasible when there is sufficient communication bandwidth available between the partitions.