Sun investigating object-aware CPUs

Eyeing boosts in application performance, Sun is researching how to improve handling of objects in multiprocessors with a project dubbed Maxwell.

The company also has projects in its labs pertaining to embedding the Java Virtual Machine on sensors, running Visual Basic on the JVM and a prototype environment for exploring Java modifications. The company detailed these efforts in meeting with InfoWorld at Sun offices in Menlo Park, Calif. last Friday afternoon.

Maxwell is intended to enable microprocessors to handle objects such as Java objects. The goal is to develop an object-aware memory architecture, with the benefit of making programs run faster.

"What we've been working [on] now for some years in my group is to understand and try to invent techniques which would allow hardware to run Java-based systems more effectively," said Mario Wolczko, a lead researcher at Sun Labs.

The way memory has been addressed has not changed much in 30 years, Wolczko said. Processes get flat, linear address space and software is used to interpret that data, he added.

"It looks interesting to have a notion of [an] object, which is pushed down into the hardware layer," Wolczko said. Object management and garbage collection services, to free memory space, would be provided for in hardware.

"Our work is in looking at how you would design memory systems to make object management and garbage collection much more efficient by virtue of having hardware support for that," Wolczko said.

"The problem in hardware design these days is the processors run so much faster than memory," Wolczko said. Current systems do not really understand what is in memory and just assign a chunk of it.

"We're trying to have the memory system understand more about what you want," as a programmer, Wolczko said.

Sun Labs is eying servers as the destination for Maxwell-equipped processors. The technology could be applied to object-oriented languages such as Java or Python and to processors such as Sparc, although there are no concrete plans yet for it to go into specific processors. Intel processors are a possibility, but unlikely, given the "fairly hostile" relationship between Intel and Sun, said Wolczko.

Although Maxwell is a project that has been in development for about five years, there is no set time yet for it to turn up in actual products. The closest technology on the market to Maxwell is Azul Systems's Java optimization done through specialized hardware, Wolckzo said.

Also in the labs is an embedded systems project called Squawk. It features a small JVM that runs directly on the processor, without assuming the presence of an operating system.

"Where Squawk fits in is on the lower end of the spectrum, mostly for battery-operated devices and things that need to be power-aware," said Eric Arseneau, also a lead researcher at Sun Labs.

The types of devices envisioned for Squawk include wireless, battery-operated, low-power sensors. These sensors could feed back data such as information on water pressure to a central server.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.