It's not really "BEAM on the JVM", it's actually a translator of BEAM compiled code to JVM bytecode. But the concept is similar, the target for Erlang is important, but so far a variety of things have been used. JAM was the original VM, later BEAM, later BEAM with HiPE. See [1] for some more information. There was also, apparently, an Erlang-to-Scheme translator. It'd be interesting (does this exist yet?) to see someone implement Erlang semantics in Racket.
