Thu Mar 4, 2010, 11:00-12:00, 4549 BH

Real-time Java on Bare Metal

Filip Pizlo
Purdue University 

Real-time systems are ubiquitous, yet most are still written using decades-old
programming languages because these language provide a simple worst-case
performance model.  Java, on the other hand, is thought to require highly
opportunistic optimization strategies with highly unpredictable performance.
The Fiji VM is a hard real-time Java virtual machine which provide deterministic
performance guarantees. This presentation outlines the compiler techniques
used to generate efficient yet predictable machine code and goes into the
detail of a new garbage collection algorithm which achieves hard time and
space bounds through the notion of fragmentation tolerance. Performance
results on embedded applications show that Java can be competitive with
C in terms of throughput and predictability.

This talk is based on joint work with Luke Ziarek, Ethan Blanton, Tony Hosking,
Petr Maj and Jan Vitek and will appear at Eurosys 2010 and PLDI 2010.

Bio:
Filip Pizlo is a PhD student at the S3 Lab at Purdue University.  He has 
spent the last seven years working on programming models and implementation 
strategies for managed programming languages, especially in the real-time space.
His work covers all aspects of virtual machine and runtime implementation. 
Filip is the lead developer of the Fiji VM.

Host: Jens Palsberg