A reconfigurable processor infrastructure for accelerating Java applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present a reconfigurable processor infrastructure to accelerate Java applications, called Jaguar. The Jaguar infrastructure consists of a compiler framework and a runtime environment support. The compiler framework selects a group of Java methods to be translated into hardware for delivering the best performance under limited resources, and translates the selected Java methods into Verilog synthesizable code modules. The runtime environment support includes the Java virtual machine (JVM) running on a host processor to provide Java execution environment to the generated Java accelerator through communication interface units while preserving Java semantics. Our compiler infrastructure is a tightly integrated and solid compiler-aided solution for Java reconfigurable computing. There is no limitation in generating synthesizable Verilog modules from any Java application while preserving Java semantics. In terms of performance, our infrastructure achieves the speedup by 5.4 times on average and by up to 9.4 times in measured benchmarks with respect to JVM-only execution. Furthermore, two optimization schemes such as an instruction folding and a live buffer removal can reduce 24% on average and up to 39% of the resource consumption.