Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - COOTS 99

Tuning Branch Predictors to Support Virtual Method Invocation in Java

N. Vijaykrishnan, Pennsylvania State University; N. Ranganathan, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

Java's object oriented nature along with its distributed nature make it a good choice for network computing. The use of virtual methods associated with Java's object oriented behavior requires accurate target prediction for indirect branches. This is critical to the performance of Java applications executed on deeply pipelined, wide issue processors. In this paper, we investigate the use of a path history based predictor to accurately determine the target of these virtual methods. The effect of varying the various parameters of the predictor on the misprediction rates is studied using various Java benchmarks. Results from this study show that the execution of Java code will benefit from more sophisticated branch-predictors.
  • View the full text of this paper in HTML form and PDF form.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.

  • To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 21 Mar 2002 ml
Technical Program
Conference index
USENIX home