AMD and Oracle to improve GPU support to OpenJDK
During the JavaOne 2012 Strategy Keynote, AMD announced its participation in OpenJDK™ Project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments. The OpenJDK Project “Sumatra” will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).
According to the project proposal, Sumatra “will demonstrate the performance advantages of offloading Java compute to a GPU” and allow Java applications “to seamlessly take advantage of a GPU — whether it is a discrete device or integrated with a CPU. In a nutshell, the goal of the project is to improve performance and power consumption, and to help bring heterogeneous computing to Java for server and cloud environments.
As emerging server and cloud platforms tap into the heterogeneous compute capabilities of APUs and discrete GPUs to achieve enhanced power/performance capabilities, developers are requiring mainstream programming models such as Java to help them harness the advantages of GPU acceleration. Project “Sumatra” may also provide guidance on enabling heterogeneous compute support for other JVM-based languages such as Scala, JRuby and Jython.
“Affirming our plans to contribute to the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers and can potentially lead to future developments of new hardware models, as well as server and cloud programming paradigms,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions at AMD. “AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community.”
Oracle and AMD are encouraging individuals and organizations to participate in the Sumatra Project through the OpenJDK community. More information is available on the OpenJDK Web site.
Category: News
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