Accelerating Java on Embedded GPU: A programmer's perspective

Multicore CPUs and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are omnipresent in today’s market-leading smartphones and tablets. With CPUs and GPUs getting more complex, maximizing hardware utilization is becoming problematic. The challenges faced in GPGPU (General Purpose computing using GPU) on embedded platforms are different from their desktop counterparts due to their memory and computational limitations. This book evaluates the performance and energy efficiency achieved by offloading Java applications to an embedded GPU. Our experiments were conducted on a Freescale i.MX6Q SabreLite board which encompasses a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU and a Vivante GC 2000 GPU that supports the OpenCL 1.1 Embedded Profile. We successfully accelerated Java code and reduced energy consumption by employing two approaches, namely JNI-OpenCL, and JOCL, which is a popular Java-binding for OpenCL. These approaches can be easily implemented on other platforms by embedded Java programmers to exploit the computational power of GPUs. Our results show up to an 8 times increase in performance efficiency and 3 times decrease in energy consumption compared to the embedded CPU-only execution of Java program.