Designing and compiling functional Java for the Fresh Breeze architecture

Abstract

The Fresh Breeze architecture is a novel approach to computing that aims to support a high degree of parallelism. Rather than striving for heroic complexity in order to support exceptional single-thread performance, as in the Pentium and PowerPC processors, it focuses on using a medium level of complexity with a view to enabling exceptional parallelized performance. The design makes certain sacrifices with regard to capability in order to achieve a lower degree of complexity. These design choices have significant implications for compiling for the architecture. In particular, Fresh Breeze uses immutable, fixed-size memory chunks rather than sequential, mutable memory to store data [1][2][3]. This work demonstrates Functional Java, a subset of the Java language that one can compile to Fresh Breeze machine code with relative ease, overcoming challenges pertaining to aliased arrays and objects. It also describes work on a compiler designed for the Fresh Breeze architecture and how the work overcomes various challenges in compiling Java bytecode to data flow graphs.