SHAP — Scalable Multi-Core Java Bytecode Processor

Abstract This paper introduces a new embedded Java multi-core architecture which shows a significantly better performance for a large number of cores than the related projects JopCMP and jamuth IP multi-core. The cores gain fast access to the shared heap by a fullduplex bus with pipelined transactions. Each core is equipped with local on-chip memory for the Java operand stack and the method cache to further reduce the memory bandwidth requirements. As opposed to the related projects, synchronization is supported on a per object-basis instead of a single lock. Load balancing is implemented in Java and requires no additional hardware. The multi-port memory manager includes an exact and fully concurrent garbage collector for automatic memory management. The design can be synthesized for a variable number of parallel cores and shows a linear increase in chip-space. Three different benchmarks demonstrate the very good scalability of our architecture. Due to limited chip-space on our evaluation platform, the core count could not be increased further than 8. But, we expect a smooth performance decrease