Method speculation of object-oriented programs attempts to exploit
method-level parallelism (MLP) by executing sequential method
invocations in parallel, while still maintaining correct sequential
ordering of data dependencies and memory accesses. In this paper, we
show why the Java virtual machine is an effective environment for
exploiting method-level parallelism, and demonstrate how method
speculation can potentially speed up single-threaded, general purpose
Java programs. Results from our study show that significant speedups
can be achieved on data-parallel applications with minimal programmer
and compiler effort.  On control-flow dependent programs, moderate
speedups have been achieved, suggesting more significant performance
improvements on these types of programs may come from more careful
analysis or re-coding of the application.  For both classes of
applications, we discover performance debugging drastically improves
speedups by eliminating or minimizing dependencies !  that limit the
effectiveness of method speculation.

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The author's web site:

<a href="http://www-hydra.stanford.edu/">www-hydra.stanford.edu/</a>