MJC October Event

We have a couple of talks lined up for this event. Many thanks to ECOM for hosting and sponsoring.

Talk: Not your father's Java (21), not your mother's JavaScript

20 years ago, Java started supporting regular expressions and XML, and JavaScript learned to interact with DOM in IE6 and Netscape. Neanderthals just stopped hunting mammoths after the dot-com bubble burst, while Millennials were mastering the usage of XMLHttpRequest to send SOAP messages, which allowed users to buy philosophical compositions, including "In da Club" and "Chihuahua". Not to mention that WASM at that time roughly meant Open Watcom Assembler.

Currently, a new Java version is released every six months, and the ECMAScript specification is updated every year. We designate types in TypeScript and run it on the server, and at the same time, there is a JVM implementation in WebAssembly. We write "var" and anonymous functions in Java and define private fields in JS classes.

Let’s have some fun and see how many analogous things have appeared in two languages with similar names that are so often discussed as opposites. The big picture always helps to decide which instrument is better for the tail and which for the trunk.

Speaker: Dmitry Chuyko

Dmitry Chuyko is a Senior Performance Architect at BellSoft, an OpenJDK committer, and a public speaker. Prior to joining BellSoft, Dmitry worked on the Hotpot JVM at Oracle, and before that he had many years of programming experience in Java. He is currently focused on optimizing HotSpot for x86 and ARM, previously being involved in rolling out JEP 386, which enables the creation of the smallest JDK containers. Dmitry continues his journey in the containerization process and is happy to share his insights and expertise in this field. Dmitry is a well-known speaker in the Java community, and one of his recent public presentations is available here.

Talk: Tornado VM

The emergence of heterogeneous hardware resources has posed a significant obstacle for the Java programming language to keep up with the “Write Once Run Anywhere” paradigm. The reality is that several parts of the Java Virtual Machine must be modified to make Java portable for execution on modern heterogeneous hardware, such as GPUs and FPGAs. To tackle this challenge, TornadoVM is implemented in the University of Manchester as an open-source software technology that enables OpenJDK and other JDK distributions to offload parts of Java applications onto heterogeneous hardware for parallel execution.

This talk will present the latest features of TornadoVM, and it will showcase examples of how the TornadoVM API can be utilised to abstract heterogeneous hardware and increase the performance of Java applications. The goal is to explain the basic terms of TornadoVM including all new API extensions, in order for developers to take advantage of heterogeneous hardware with minimal effort.

Speaker: Thanos Stratikopoulos

Thanos Stratikopoulos obtained his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Manchester in 2019. His PhD thesis focused on the hardware acceleration of system software for novel storage technologies. Since December 2018, he has been a member of the TornadoVM team. Recently he was awarded a grant by Innovate UK to undertake market exploration for TornadoVM. Additionally, he has been appointed by the University of Manchester as Impact Champion to facilitate researchers of the university towards productizing their research assets. Finally, he is involved in several EU Horizon 2020, EU Horizon Europe, and UKRI projects and his interests include computer architecture, high-performance computing, virtualization and cloud acceleration.