Java is for sure the most popular programming language today. Its popularity is based on the
portability of the code and on the elegant programming framework provided by the language:
built in garbage collection and multi-threaded support, easy Internet application development
through socket streams, and last but not least familiar syntax. Even if a lot of work has already
been done related to Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) and a large number of Java applications are
already available, few of these have penetrated the DSP world. Our work aims to bridge this gap
between DSP architectures and Java. Such a connection would open the DSP world to a much
larger class of consumers, a place now occupied by general-purpose processors.
The two main research directions we see in improving the performance of a JVM for DSP
architectures are: (1) writing a Java bytecode Just-In-Time compiler optimized for a specific DSP
platform, and (2), taking advantage of the available parallelism present in DSP multi-processor
architectures. Our work focuses on the last issue. We propose a distributed JVM designed for a
multi-processor DSP architecture. Due to the unavailability of the hardware at the moment, we
have implemented our ideas on a network of general-purpose processors, emulating the topology
of the quad-processor DSP board constructed by Innovative DSP. We emulate the I/O channels
connecting the processors through TCP sockets and interrupts with Unix signals. All the protocols
use a constant number of messages, making it possible to estimate the costs of all distributed
actions.