DISK:A Distributed Java Virtua

Java is for sure the most popular programming language today. Its popularity is based on the
portability of the code and on the elegant programming framework provided by the language:
built in garbage collection and multi-threaded support, easy Internet application development
through socket streams, and last but not least familiar syntax. Even if a lot of work has already
been done related to Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) and a large number of Java applications are
already available, few of these have penetrated the DSP world. Our work aims to bridge this gap
between DSP architectures and Java. Such a connection would open the DSP world to a much
larger class of consumers, a place now occupied by general-purpose processors.
The two main research directions we see in improving the performance of a JVM for DSP
architectures are: (1) writing a Java bytecode Just-In-Time compiler optimized for a specific DSP
platform, and (2), taking advantage of the available parallelism present in DSP multi-processor
architectures. Our work focuses on the last issue. We propose a distributed JVM designed for a
multi-processor DSP architecture. Due to the unavailability of the hardware at the moment, we
have implemented our ideas on a network of general-purpose processors, emulating the topology
of the quad-processor DSP board constructed by Innovative DSP. We emulate the I/O channels
connecting the processors through TCP sockets and interrupts with Unix signals. All the protocols
use a constant number of messages, making it possible to estimate the costs of all distributed
actions.