Why Should I Rewrite My Software When Dynamic Compilation Can Be Good Enough?

Trends in device manufacturing and processor development have made it abundantly clear that heterogeneous many-core processors are going to be the dominant computational platform for execut-ing tomorrow’s applications. Projections are that these platforms will soon contain thousands of cores, many of which will be highly customized to provide as much computational capacity as possible within a fixed power budget. Clearly there are many challenges associated with engineering such complex systems, but software development is the most critical one. Looking at the problem from an economic perspective, peo-ple purchase computers because of the valuable services they pro-vide. Almost universally, these services are developed in software. New services are constantly being enabled by more powerful hard-ware, which drives consumers to purchase that new hardware, and fuels the computing industry in a positive feedback loop [11]. Cur