International Business Machines Corporation

Paul Jerome Kilpatrick

Michael Wayne Brown

Robert John Urquhart

Kelvin Roderick Lawrence

Robert Francis Berry

Riaz Yousuf Hussain

William Preston Alexander, Iii

Randall Ray Heisch

Weiming Gu

Kenneth L Jeffries

Michael Thomas Collins

Judith G Haber

The present invention is directed to a system, method, and computer-readable medium for providing a highly efficient locking mechanism for an object's shared data. The locking mechanism is bound to an object during program execution (i.e. during run-time) when synchronization is first requested for the object's shared data. Thus, there are no changes to the actual code, either source code or binary code, which defines the object. A locking mechanism is bound to an object by defining a memory area within the object's header, which either contains the locking mechanism or a pointer to a locking mechanism. The locking mechanism remains bound to the object for the life of the object. Efficiency is gained by limiting the use of operating system semaphores (i.e. kernel semaphores). Operating system semaphores are not used unless blocking (i.e. contention) occurs. Rather, the locking mechanism bound to the object is used during non-blocking situations. Additional efficiency is gained by not assigning or initializing an object's locking mechanism until the first synchronization request is received for the object's shared data. In one embodiment of the present invention, the object's header memory area contains the actual locking mechanism. In another embodiment of the present invention, the object's header memory area contains a pointer or index to a locking mechanism.

System and method for adding highly optimized synchronization capability to objects at run-time

Method and apparatus for creating benchmark programs for the analysis of java virtual machine implementations are implemented. Java applications and applets are compiled into an intermediate code referred to as byte code. The Java byte code forms the machine code for the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine running on top of a hardware platform translates the byte code into native machine code for execution on the hardware platform on which the Java Virtual Machine is running. The performance of a Java Virtual Machine is improved by the use of a so-called 'just in time' (JIT) compiler that translates commonly occurring sequences of bytes codes in the native instruction sequences which are then stored for later execution. Critical to the performance of the JIT is the ability of the JIT to optimally compile for the most commonly occurring sequences of byte codes. The method and apparatus for creating benchmark programs provides a means for performance measurements with respect to such sequences.

Method and apparatus for benchmarking byte code sequences

The present invention is an system and method for optimizing a program, having qualified elements, at the source level. The method includes the steps of instrumenting each path of the qualified elements to create an instrumented program, executing the instrumented program to produce instrumentation information for each of the paths, analyzing the instrumentation information, and in response to the analyzing step, restructuring the program to create an optimize program.

Profile-based preprocessor for optimizing programs

A mechanism allowing nested resource locks among a plurality of related programs is provided by means of a lock counter which is incremented and decremented as programs LOCK and UNLOCK a resource but the resource is not released until a count is zero. A separate LOCK counter is provided for each resource in the system.

Nested resource control using locking and unlocking routines with use

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Paul Jerome Kilpatrick