Jupiter: A modular and extensible Java Virtual Machine framework

We present and evaluate the design and implementation of a flexible and efficient Java Virtual Machine (JVM) framework called Jupiter. This framework employs a modular, object-oriented building-block architecture to provide the flexibility required to explore a wide variety of design ideas with relatively little effort. In addition, the Jupiter framework is designed to provide the performance necessary to properly evaluate the impact of various implementations and combinations of ideas. Evaluation of Jupiter's modular structure through modification experiments indicate that it is highly flexible and extensible. Evaluation of the Jupiter interpreter's performance using the standard SPECjvm98 benchmark suite shows that it provides good performance: it is 2.65 times faster than Kaffe, a freely available JVM, and 2.20 times slower than Sun's highly-optimized JDK interpreter. We believe that Jupiter's unique flexibility and good performance make it an excellent vehicle for research into JVM scalability issues for high-performance computing on large multiprocessors.