Azul@Purdue Project

Recently, our team acquired a revolutionary Azul appliance platform. I had a great opportunity to play with this exciting hardware a little when installing and running the first helloworld programs both in Java and C. This was the first time ever that this machine was used in an academic institution. Here is some more info:

Azul appliance is built around the Vega 3 chip and is a unique virtualization platform that features 54 cores pre processor giving users the power to run up to 800 Java threads in parallel.  Futhermore, the appliance offers ~700GB of memory while running a concurrent GC that achieves garbage collection without any pauses in the host application.

Find more at our webpage: http://sss.cs.purdue.edu/projects/azul/

Garbage Collection and Real-time Garbage Collection Introduction

Here are some documents and slides you may find useful when studying Garbage Collection and Real-time Garbage Collection:

First, look at SUN's
Memory Management in the Java HotSpotTM Virtual Machine. Its from 2006 but contains a very nice introduction to GC, even parallel and small-pause collection algorithms are mentioned.

An another introduction slides are:
GC Introduction Presentation

When looking at performance of GCs, look at a nice study
Myths & Realities The Performance Impact of Garbage Collection from Steve Blackburn, Perry Cheng and Kathryn McKinley.

For interesting implementation details, I recommend:

• Barrier techniques for incremental tracing 
• And Schism GC paper presented at PLDI (2010), contains also a very nice performance statistics.
• GC FAQ

Static Checker for SCJ: Paper and its Presentation

Presentation of our Static SCJ Checker is now available online:

Static Checker for Safety-Critical Java Annotations

The paper itself can be downloaded from JTRES2010 webpage.

Developing Safety-Critical Java Applications with oSCJ : Presentation

Our oSCJ slides presented at JTRES:

oSCJ : Safety Critical Java Virtual Machine Development

View more our presentations.

Developing Safety-Critical Java Applications with oSCJ

Read our oSCJ paper:

Developing Safety-Critical Java Applications with oSCJ

Abstract:

We present oSCJ, an implementation of the draft of Safety Critical Java (SCJ) specification. SCJ is designed to make Java amenable to writing mission- and safety-critical software. It does this by defining a subset of the Real-time Specification for Java that trades expressiveness for verifiability. 

This paper gives a high-level description of our implementation of the first compliance level of the SCJ speci- fication, a library called oSCJ, and reports on performance evaluation on the Ovm real-time Java virtual machine. We compare SCJ to C on both a real-time operating system on the RTEMS/LEON3 platform and Linux on a x86. Our results suggest that a high-degree of predictability and competitive performance can indeed be achieved.

The paper will be presented at JTRES'10 in Prague.

Download the paper in [PDF].

JTRES'10: Advance Program

The advance program of the JTRES conference, held next week in Prague, is already availabe at JTRES Webpage. Here are some highlights. 

The keynotes:

• Greg Bollella (ORACLE) : Some Recent Developments Around The RTSJ and Oracle.
• Marc Pantel (University of Toulouse) : Certification and qualification concerns in the development of safety critical systems.
• Rainer Trummer (University of Salzburg) : The JAviator Project
• Marek Prochazka (European Space Agency) : Java in Space?

Also, do not miss the presentations of our two papers, I will be presenting:

• Developing Safety-Critical Java Applications with oSCJ/L0 by Ales Plsek, Lei Zhao, Veysel H. Sahin, Daniel Tang, Tomas Kalibera, and Jan Vitek

          and

• Static Checking of Safety-Critical Java Annotations by Daniel Tang, Ales Plsek, and Jan Vitek

See you at JTRES.

Certification challenges for Real-Time Java

A very interesting article about recent development in the area of certification for Real-time Java: 

DO-178B certification challenges for real-time Java applications

Its exciting to see that Safety-Critical Java (JSR-302) is in the middle of these efforts!

See our implementation of safety-critical Java here: oSCJ