Performance Characterization of Java Applications on SMT Processors

As Java is emerging as one of the major programming languages in software development, studying how Java applications behave on recent SMT processors is of great interest. This paper characterizes the performance of Java applications on an Intel Pentium 4 hyper-threading processor. Using the performance counters provided by Pentium 4, we quantitatively evaluate micro-architecture metrics while running various types of Java applications. The experimental results reveal that: (1) Hyper-threading can indeed improve the performance of multithreaded Java programs; (2) The resource contentions within Pentium 4 are the major reason of pipeline inefficiency, which prevents better performance promised by SMT; (3) The static partition design of hyper-threading causes considerable performance loss for many single-thread Java programs; (4) Most multiprogrammed Java benchmarks can achieve decent combined speedups on hyper-threading processors