350 papers · page 7 of 18
This paper presents a new concurrent garbage collection algorithm based on two types of reference, strong and weak, to link the graph of objects. Strong references connect the roots to all the nodes in the graph but do not contain cycles. Weak references may, however, contain cyc…
Memory management system performance is of increasing importance in today's managed languages. Two lingering sources of overhead are the direct costs of memory allocations and write barriers. This paper introduces it allocation folding, an optimization technique where the virtual…
One important type of parallelism exploited in many applications is reduction type parallelism. In these applications, the order of the read-modify-write updates to one shared data object can be arbitrary as long as there is an imposed order for the read-modify-write updates. The…
We present the sticky trie, a new variant of the standard trie data structure that achieves high-performing atomic insertions and lookups for large key universes by precluding deletions. It has applications in several areas, including address tracking, logging, and garbage collec…
Most of today's programs make use of a sizable heap to store dynamic data. To characterize the heap dynamics, this paper presents a set of metrics to measure the average amount of data live and dead in a period of execution. They are collectively called average liveness. The pape…
Specialties:15+ years of virtual machine implementation experience with special focus on memory management / garbage collection. Close to 20 years of C/C++ experience. 15+ years of Java experience. Expert in concurrent/parallel programming.
We present techniques for efficient computation of points-to information for C programs. Pointer analysis is an important phase in the compilation process. The computed points-to information and the alias information is useful for client analyses from varied domains such as bug f…
Intel's latest processor microarchitecture, Haswell, adds support for a restricted form of transactional memory to the x86 programming model. We explore how this can be applied to three garbage collection scenarios in Jikes RVM: parallel copying, concurrent copying and bitmap mar…
Real-world garbage collectors in managed languages are complex. We investigate whether this complexity is really necessary and show that by having a different (but wider) interface between the collector and the developer, we can achieve high performance with off-the-shelf compone…
Most proposals for on-the-fly garbage collection ignore the question of Java's weak and other reference types. However, we show that reference types are heavily used in DaCapo benchmarks. Of the few collectors that do address this issue, most block mutators, either globally or in…
As the number of cores continuously grows, processor designers are considering non coherent memories as more scalable and energy efficient alternatives to the current coherent ones. The Java Memory Model (JMM) requires that all cores can access the Java heap. It guarantees sequen…
We present ACDC, an open-source benchmark that may be configured to emulate explicit single- and multi-threaded memory allocation, sharing, access, and deallocation behavior to expose virtually any relevant allocator performance differences. ACDC mimics periodic memory allocation…
As caches become larger and shared by an increasing number of cores, cache management is becoming more important. This paper explores collaborative caching, which uses software hints to influence hardware caching. Recent studies have shown that such collaboration between software…
Over the past decade, the increasing demands on data-driven business intelligence have led to the proliferation of large-scale, data-intensive applications that often have huge amounts of data (often at terabyte or petabyte scale) to process. An object-oriented programming langua…
Experimental evaluation is key to systems research. Because modern systems are complex and non-deterministic, good experimental methodology demands that researchers account for uncertainty. To obtain valid results, they are expected to run many iterations of benchmarks, invoke vi…
In this paper, we propose a novel method for context-sensitive pointer analysis using the value flow graph (VFG) formulation. We achieve context-sensitivity by simultaneously applying function cloning and computing context-free language reachability (CFL-reachability) in a novel …
Mark-compact garbage collection helps long-running programs avoid fragmentation. The Lisp2 mark-compact collector is a classic but still widely-used compaction algorithm. It sequentially scans the entire heap to compact all live objects at one end of the heap while preserving the…
No abstract available.
Programs written in multiple languages are known as polyglot programs. In part due to the proliferation of new and productive high-level programming languages, these programs are becoming more common in environments that must interoperate with existing systems. Polyglot programs …
Garbage collection is widely used and has largely been a boon for programmer productivity. However, traditional garbage collection is approaching both practical and theoretical performance limits. In practice, the maximum heap size and heap structure of large applications are inf…