Azul Systems has announced the Managed Runtime Initiative. The Initiative is an effort to identify, develop, and deliver enhanced interfaces and functionality across vertical components of the systems stack in order to improve the execution of managed runtime, such as Java, Ruby, and .NET.

By enhancing interfaces between the managed runtime, the operating system kernel, and the underlying hypervisor, dramatic performance and scalability improvements can be realized. As part of the launch of the Initiative, Azul is contributing an open source reference implementation based on enhancements to OpenJDK and the Linux operating system.

“There is a significant disconnect between the needs of managed runtimes and the capabilities provided by operating systems and hypervisors,” said Scott Sellers, President and CEO of Azul Systems. “As a result, runtimes such as Java are severely limited by inconsistent response times, ineffective use of available hardware resources, and lack of scalability. The goal of this Initiative is to address these challenges in a holistic manner, promoting technical advancements across the entire systems stack.”

In order to facilitate change across multiple layers of the systems stack, represented by a wide array of projects and vendors, the Initiative will advocate new interfaces and functionality and will develop reference implementations to demonstrate the value of specific system stack enhancements. The Initiative will also cooperate and coordinate with commercial vendors and open source communities, and where appropriate, upstream contributions into existing and complementary open source projects to ensure widest availability.

"I’m excited about the Managed Runtime Initiative and the contribution Azul is making to the Open Source community,” said James Gosling, the inventor of the Java programming language. “Managed runtimes have come a long way since the mid 90s. However, the rest of the systems stack has not evolved to meet the needs of these now pervasive application environments. This Initiative will serve to bring new functionality to the systems stack, freeing managed runtimes to continue their growth and evolution."

"Today’s managed runtimes are constrained by response time and scale limitations, and are unable to fully utilize modern hardware,” said Gil Tene, CTO of Azul Systems. “Azul’s proven solutions for runtime responsiveness and garbage collection are key components of our contribution, demonstrating that by coordinating enhancements across the runtime and the OS layers, Java responsiveness, scale and throughput can all be improved by 100x or more.”