SIMD intrinsics on managed language runtimes

Managed language runtimes such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) provide adequate performance for a wide range of applications, but at the same time, they lack much of the low-level control that performance-minded programmers appreciate in languages like C/C++. One important example is the intrinsics interface that exposes instructions of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) vector ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures). In this paper we present an automatic approach for including native intrinsics in the runtime of a managed language. Our implementation consists of two parts. First, for each vector ISA, we automatically generate the intrinsics API from the vendor-provided XML specification. Second, we employ a metaprogramming approach that enables programmers to generate and load native code at runtime. In this setting, programmers can use the entire high-level language as a kind of macro system to define new high-level vector APIs with zero overhead. As an example use case we show a variable precision API. We provide an end-to-end implementation of our approach in the HotSpot VM that supports all 5912 Intel SIMD intrinsics from MMX to AVX-512. Our benchmarks demonstrate that this combination of SIMD and metaprogramming enables developers to write high-performance, vectorized code on an unmodified JVM that outperforms the auto-vectorizing HotSpot just-in-time (JIT) compiler and provides tight integration between vectorized native code and the managed JVM ecosystem.