News - GPU acceleration to provide tenfold Java performance boost

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IBM's Chief Technology Officer of Java discussed ‘Java on GPU’ in keynote speech.

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Read more.

IME you can accelerate a java program 10x by re-writing it in C ;)

Isn't this just taking advantages of the improvements in the JNI? Now you can relatively easily have your VM memory exposed to a C API such as CUDA. AFAIK it isn't really translating java at all, merely thunking primitive types. It would be more impressive if it was doing cross compilation or similar.

TBH the 7 year old 'Accelerator' project:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/...s/accelerator/
looks more interesting.

Will this work on Minecraft?

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

IME you can accelerate a java program 10x by re-writing it in C ;)

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Oh so true - as a colleague of mine commented - "JAVA, does that stand for Just Always Very Arthritic?". Waiting for a standalone Java app to get itself together at the moment - hence I've got the time to do a Hexus posting.

Weren't there some companies - and I'm pretty sure IBM were one - who were working on some kind of cross-compiler so you could test or do low impact stuff with the Java VM, and then cross-compile when you needed that last erg of speed?

Also got to wonder how relevant it is these days - other languages such as Python seem to be able to do a lot of what Java was slated for with a lot less fuss. Also don't think that it's particularly relevant to the home user these days - more of a business tech - although there's exceptions like Minecraft and the password manager I use, (and Android's kinda-java Dalvik). But then again, maybe I'm being biased since Oracle is holding the reins.

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

Isn't this just taking advantages of the improvements in the JNI? Now you can relatively easily have your VM memory exposed to a C API such as CUDA. AFAIK it isn't really translating java at all, merely thunking primitive types. It would be more impressive if it was doing cross compilation or similar.

TBH the 7 year old 'Accelerator' project:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/...s/accelerator/
looks more interesting.

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I'm not sure what it's doing behind the scenes but it sounds like they are re-writing the API classes rather rather than doing anything with the JVM itself...

Edit: possibly an offshoot of this:

http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/res...ng08Liquid.pdf
http://domino.research.ibm.com/libra...anguage,manual
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/res...2Compiling.pdf