Quicksilver: Quasi-static compilation of Java

Refereed publications

• Quasi-Static Compilation for Java, Mauricio Serrano, Rajesh Bordawekar, Sam Midkiff, Manish Gupta, to appear, 2000 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Languages and Systems,October 15-19, Minneapolis, Minnesota USA.

  Abstract

  This paper presents the design and implementation of a Quasi-static compiler for Java.Quasi-static compilation is a new approach that combines the benefits of static and dynamic compilation, while maintaining compliance with the Java standard, including support of its dynamic features. A Quasi-static compiler relies on the generation and reuse of persistent code images to reduce the overhead of compilation during program execution, and to provide identical, testable and reliable binaries over different program executions. At run-time, the Quasi-static compiler adapts pre-compiled binaries to the current JVM instance, and uses dynamic compilation of the code when necessary to support dynamic Java features. Our system allows interprocedural program optimizations to be performed while maintaining binary compatibility. Experimental data obtained using a preliminary implementation of a Quasi-static compiler in the Jalapeño JVM clearly demonstrate the benefits of our approach: we achieve run-time compilation cost lower than that of fast non-optimizing compilation, and deliver the run-time program performance of the highest optimization level supported by the Jalapeño optimizing compiler, thus achieving the highest overall performance. For the evaluated benchmarks, the cost of run-time quasi-static compilation varied from 1 microseconds to 5 microseconds per code instruction. For the SPECjvm98 benchmark suite, this represents a factor of 170 to 350 reduction in the runtime compilation overhead relative to the Jalapeño optimizing compiler.

back to publications, or the top

Presentations by group members

• Enabling High Overhead Analysis in a Dynamic Compiler with Quasi-Static Compilation (pdf, 390K), presented at the Dagstuhl seminar on Code Optimisation: Trends, Challenges and Perspectives, September 18, 2000.

back to presentations, or the top

Calls for papers

• Call for papers and workshop web page for the 13th Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computers

back to the top

Related links

• The Jalapeño project provides much of the infrastructure for Quicksilver.
• The Ninja project demonstrates that Java can provide near Fortran performance on a set of Java benchmarks.

back to the top

Group members

back to the top