During the JavaOne 2012 strategy keynote, Advanced Micro Devices announced its participation in OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments.

The OpenJDK project “Sumatra” will explore how the Java virtual machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).

As emerging server and cloud platforms tap into the heterogeneous compute capabilities of APUs and discrete GPUs to achieve enhanced power/performance capabilities, developers are requiring mainstream programming models such as Java to help them harness the advantages of GPU acceleration. Project “Sumatra” may also provide guidance on enabling heterogeneous compute support for other JVM-based languages such as Scala, JRuby and Jython.

“Affirming our plans to contribute to the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers and can potentially lead to future developments of new hardware models, as well as server and cloud programming paradigms. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD.

Tags: AMD, Oracle, Opteron, Sun