AMD said Monday that it's going to contribute to the Sumatra OpenJDK Project, which is focused on bringing heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments.

Sumatra will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to let applications take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).

AMD said that "As emerging server and cloud platforms tap into the heterogeneous compute capabilities of APUs and discrete GPUs for enhanced power/performance capabilities, developers need mainstream programming models such as Java to help them harness the advantages of GPU acceleration."

Sumatra may also provide guidance on enabling heterogeneous compute support for other JVM-based languages such as Scala, JRuby and Jython.