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Returning Control to the Programmer: SIMD Intrinsics for Virtual Machines.

The article discusses single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) units within interpreted software languages and the use of same to simplify computer programs. The interpreted language Java and others reportedly have failed to evolve sufficiently to properly use modern computer processors. Thus, SIMDs...

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Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 54; no. 4; pp. 38 - 44
Main Authors: PARRI, JONATHAN, SHAPIRO, DANIEL, BOLIC, MIODRAG, GROZA, VOICU
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Apr2011
Subjects:
Microprocessor design & construction
Programming languages
Java programming language
Computer research
Multicore processors
Computer programming
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:The article discusses single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) units within interpreted software languages and the use of same to simplify computer programs. The interpreted language Java and others reportedly have failed to evolve sufficiently to properly use modern computer processors. Thus, SIMDs said to be available in most computers and servers are being underutilized as a result. Associated performance disparities that involve multicore computer processors are discussed. The authors opine regarding generic user-known parallel operation calls and their direct mapping to native SIMD calls in virtual machine internals.