Abstract

Virtual machines (VMs) such as the Java VM are a popular format for running architectureneutral code in a managed runtime. Such VMs are typically implemented using a combination of interpretation and just-in-time compilation (JIT). A significant challenge for the portability of VM code is the growing popularity of multi-core architectures with specialized processing cores aimed at computation-intensive applications such as media processing. Such cores differ greatly in architectural design compared to traditional desktop processors. One such processing core is the Cell Broadband Engine’s (Cell BE) Synergistic Processing Element (SPE). An SPE is a light weight VLIW processor core with a SIMD vector instruction set. In this paper we investigate some popular interpreter optimizations and introduce new optimizations exploiting the special hardware properties offered by the Cell BE’s SPE. 1

Citations