Project Proposal: GPU support

[John Coomes]

In accordance with the OpenJDK guidelines [1], we would like to start
the discussion of a new project to explore implementing GPU support in
Java with a native JVM. This project intends to enable Java
applications to seamlessly take advantage of a GPU--whether it is a
discrete device or integrated with a CPU--with the objective to
improve the application performance.

This project will demonstrate the performance advantages of offloading
Java compute to a GPU.  We propose to use the Hotspot JVM, and will
concentrate on code generation, garbage collection, and
runtimes. Performance will be improved, while preserving compile time,
memory consumption and code generation quality. We anticipate that
this project will also provide guidance on enabling GPU support for
other JVM hosted languages (JavaScript/Nashorn, Scala, JRuby...).

We will start exploring leveraging the new Java 8 Lambda language and
library features. As this project progress, we may identify challenges
with the Java API and constructs which may lead to new language, JVM
and library extensions that will need standardization under the JCP
process.

To ensure the broadest possible collaboration between potential
contributors the project will maintain one or more code repositories
derived from the OpenJDK HotSpot repository [2] and a developers'
mailing list.

The HotSpot group[3] will sponsor this project.  John Coomes will be
the initial Lead; the initial Committers and Authors are still being
determined.  (Reviewers are not needed as the project will not require
formal change review.)

Regards,

John Coomes, OpenJDK HotSpot Group Lead
Gary Frost, AMD

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/#new-project
[2] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/hsx/hotspot-main/
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/census#hotspot