The dinamica virtual machine for geosciences

Abstract

This work describes DinamicaVM, the virtual machine that runs applications developed in Dinamica EGO. Dinamica EGO is a framework used in the development of geomodeling applications. Behind its multitude of visual modes and graphic elements, Dinamica EGO runs on top of a virtual machine. This machine - DinamicaVM - offers developers a rich instruction set architecture, featuring elements such as map and reduce, which are typical in the functional/parallel world. Ensuring that these very expressive components work together efficiently is a challenging endeavour. Dinamica's runtime addresses this challenge through a suite of optimizations, which borrows ideas from functional programming languages, and leverages specific behavior expected in geo-scientific programs. As we show in this work some of these optimizations deliver speedups of almost 100x, and are key to the industrial-quality performance of one of the world's most widely used geomodeling tools.