Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models

The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets. Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support. Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to advise the design of such instruction sets. As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental environment for further research

Optimal Type Lifting

Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages have used explicit run-time type passing to support advanced optimizations such as intensional type analysis, representation analysis and tagless garbage collection. Unfortunately, maintaining type information at run time can incur a large overhead to the time and space usage of a program. In this paper, we present an optimal type-lifting algorithm that lifts all type applications in a program to the top level. Our algorithm eliminates all run-time type constructions within any core-language functions. In fact, it guarantees that the number of types built at run time is strictly a static constant. We present our algorithm as a type-preserving source-to-source transformation and show how to extend it to handle the entire SML'97 with higher-order modules. 1 Introduction Recent compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages [25, 27] have begun to use variants of the Girard-Reynolds polymorphic -calculus [5, 22] as their intermediate languag..

Optimal Type Lifting

. Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages have used explicit run-time type passing to support advanced optimizations such as intensional type analysis, representation analysis and tagless garbage collection. Unfortunately, maintaining type information at run time can incur a large overhead to the time and space usage of a program. In this paper, we present an optimal type-lifting algorithm that lifts all type applications in a program to the top level. Our algorithm eliminates all run-time type constructions within any core-language functions. In fact, it guarantees that the number of types built at run time is strictly a static constant. We present our algorithm as a type-preserving source-to-source transformation and show how to extend it to handle the entire SML'97 with higher-order modules. 1 Introduction Modern compilers for ML-like polymorphic languages [16, 17] usually use variants of the Girard-Reynolds polymorphic -calculus [5, 26] as their intermediate language (I..