Speaker: James Clarkson from the University of Manchester

Title: Tornado: Heterogeneous Programming in Java

Abstract: As the popularity of “big data” frameworks grow, a lot of effort is
currently being exerted trying to improve the performance of JVM (Java Virtual
Machine) based languages, such as Java and Scala. One way of doing this is to
develop mechanisms that allow these languages to make use of hardware
accelerators, such as GPGPUs. As a result there has been a number of projects,
such as Project Sumatra (OpenJDK) [4], Rootbeer [5] and APARAPI (AMD) [6], that
have attempted to support programming GPGPUs from Java. However, a lot of this
prior art only focuses on accelerating simple workloads or providing a interface
into another programming language - making it difficult for them to be used to
create real-world applications. In this talk I will discuss how we have
developed a framework that moves beyond the prior art and allows developers to
accelerate complex Java applications.

Our Java based framework, Tornado, provides developers with a simple a
task-based programming model which allows the assignment of task to device.
Typically, tasks are assigned to execute on a GPGPU, but could equally be
assigned to a multi-core processor or even an FPGA. Moreover, the design of
Tornado means that this assignment can be changed dynamically - meaning that
applications are not artificially restricted to using a specific class of
device. Additionally, the Tornado API has been designed to avoid the need to
re-engineer applications to utilise the framework: to do this we have had to
support a wider range of language features than the prior art - exceptions,
inheritance and objects to name a few.

Finally, we will share our experiences porting a complex CUDA C++ application
into pure Java.

Bio: James Clarkson is a 3rd year PhD student from the University of Manchester
in the UK. He is a member of the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group,
working under the supervision of Mikel Lujan. His research interests are
programming languages and programming exotic hardware architectures (in Java!).
He is actively contributing to the EPSRC funded AnyScale [1] and PAMELA [2]
projects, and has previously contributed to the EU funded Mont Blanc project
[3].

[1] AnyScale project - http://anyscale.org
[2] PAMELA project - http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/PAMELA/
[3] Mont Blanc project - https://www.montblanc-project.eu
[4] Project Sumatra - http://openjdk.java.net/projects/sumatra/
[5] Rootbeer - https://github.com/pcpratts/rootbeer1
[6] APARAPI - https://code.google.com/archive/p/aparapi/