Oracle, AMD Agree on GPU-Accelerated Java

In an announcement made at JavaOne, Oracle and AMD confirmed that the two companies have created an OpenJDK project with the goal to run the JVM on GPUs.

Phil Rogers, AMD Corporate Fellow and president of the Heterogenous System Architecture (HAS) described "Project Sumatra", which will be led initially by Oracle's John Coomes, and said that the technology will be designed to work on discrete GPUs as well as heterogeneous CPU/GPU designs, such as AMD's APUs.

Oracle disclosed that it will be using its HotSpot JVM and the libraries from Java 8's Lambda project, which was published last year as a way to support Java programming in multicore environments. If a GPU is available in a system, Java code will be converted to OpenCL code and then run on the GPU. In a statement released to the press, Georges Saab, vice president of software development for the Java Platform Group at Oracle said: "We expect our work with AMD and other OpenJDK participants in Project 'Sumatra' will eventually help provide Java developers with the ability to quickly leverage GPU acceleration for better performance."

Sumatra may become available with the release of Java 8 in 2013.

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