Enabling data science computing acceleration: Tencent Kona JDK ranks first in China for JDK18 contribution

Just now, Oracle officially released JDK18. According to Oracle's official announcement, Tencent Kona has been ranked No. 1 in the contribution of JDK18 Chinese enterprises, and has contributed to the OpenJDK open source community four times in a row (JDK15~18). At the same time, in the ranking results of OpenJDK's comprehensive contribution announced for the first time, Tencent Kona's comprehensive contribution ranked first in the country and top five in the world.

Tencent Kona JDK is one of the distributions based on the OpenJDK open source project. With the growth of its own business scale and extreme capacity requirements, Tencent Big Data has specially established a JVM R&D team, and cooperated with all company partners through the internal open source collaboration strategy to be responsible for the development and maintenance of Kona JDK. While addressing urgent needs within the company, he actively contributed to the community and participated in important projects in the OpenJDK community including JDK, Panama, and Loom. In the just-released JDK18, Kona contributed about 50 patches to the OpenJDK community.

Among them, Kona JDK has developed a high-performance Java computing engine for machine learning and big data systems to meet the needs of key business scenarios such as advertising model training and OLAP engines, which are implemented and applied in actual business scenarios. At the same time, it has contributed representative achievements such as Vector API, automatic vectorization, and mathematical library optimization to the OpenJDK community, providing a variety of "answer ideas" for solving performance problems in Java/JVM data science scenarios.

As a set of general-purpose Java programming interfaces, the Vector API accelerates performance by generating SIMD vector instructions through the Java virtual machine. With the characteristics of convenient programming, remarkable effect and cross-platform, Vector API is released in the new version of JDK as the key JEP feature for the third time.

According to official data, the Vector API can achieve a performance acceleration effect of 2 to 16 times for typical data science scenarios such as matrix operations.

Through in-depth research and long-term practical application, Kona JDK enhances many aspects of Vector API functionality and performance. For example, the translation of Vector API for AVX512 high-performance vector instructions was adapted and improved for the first time in production practice, and more than 20 patches related to vector compilers were contributed to solve the problem of performance degradation of SVML exponentiation operators.

In addition, Kona JDK also optimized the vector acceleration capability of SVML, treating a single double as a 64-bit vector for SVML acceleration. After optimization, the performance was improved by 2 to 3 times, and individual cases were as high as 9 to 10 times. With outstanding contributions, Kona JDK has become one of the top three global contributors to SVML in the OpenJDK community.

It is understood that Kona JDK began to participate in the open source contribution of Vector API in 2020; in 2021, its team members were nominated as Committers of the Vector API project; in 2022, Kona JDK officially became one of the top ten contributors to the JDK18 Vector API in the world, which marks Tencent Kona is officially among the core developers of the Vector API open source community.

In addition to contributing to the open source community, some of the latest features of Kona JDK are also "supplied" for free on Tencent Cloud, providing efficient and convenient services for users' Java applications on the cloud. At present, Kona JDK has provided stable guarantee for Tencent Cloud Big Data, Microservice Platform TSF, EMR, Big Data Suite TBDS, Tencent Cloud TI Machine Learning Platform, Messaging Middleware, Proprietary Cloud TCE and many other products.

As a global Notable contributor, Tencent Kona actively embraces open source. In addition to the JDK project, it has also made outstanding contributions in projects such as Loom. At present, Tencent has made Tencent Kona JDK8, Tencent Kona JDK11 and Tencent Kona JDK17 completely free to developers around the world.

In the future, Tencent Kona will continue to deeply participate in community construction, actively explore business scenarios, and share Tencent JDK's scientific research results and practical experience in advertising, games, payment and other scenarios with developers, so as to contribute to the continued success of the Java ecosystem.