The Impact of Java Applications at Microarchitectural Level from Branch Prediction Perspective

Abstract

The portability, the object-oriented and distributed programming models, multithreading support and automatic garbage collection are features that make Java very attractive for application developers. The main goal of this paper consists in pointing out the impact of Java applications at microarchitectural level from two perspectives: unbiased branches and indirect jumps/calls, such branches limiting the ceiling of dynamic branch prediction and causing significant performance degradation. Therefore, accurately predicting this kind of branches remains an open problem. The simulation part of the paper mainly refers to determining the context length influence on the percentage of unbiased branches from Java applications, the prediction accuracy and the usage degree obtained using a Fast Path-Based Perceptron predictor. We realize a comparison with C/C++ application behavior from unbiased branches perspective. We also analyze some Java testing programs, built using design patterns or including inheritance, polymorphism, backtracking and recursivity, in order to determine the features of indirect branches, the arity of each indirect jump and the prediction accuracy using the Target Cache predictor.