350 papers · page 8 of 18
We present Elephant Tracks (ET), a dynamic program analysis tool for Java that produces detailed traces of garbage collection-related events, including object allocations, object deaths, and pointer updates. Like prior work, our tracing tool is based on the Merlin algorithm [6,7]…
We present a new approach for constructing debuggers based on declarative specification of bug conditions and root causes, and automatic generation of debugger code. We illustrate our approach on several classes of bugs, memory or otherwise. For each bug class, bug conditions and…
We propose a new, principled approach to adaptive heap sizing based on control theory. We review current state-of-the-art heap sizing mechanisms, as deployed in Jikes RVM and HotSpot. We then formulate heap sizing as a control problem, apply and tune a standard controller algorit…
Collaborative caching allows software to use hints to influence cache management in hardware. Previous theories have shown that such hints observe the inclusion property and can obtain optimal caching if the access sequence and the cache size are known ahead of time. Previously, …
Cache miss stalls are one of the major sources of performance bottlenecks for multicore processors. A Hardware Performance Monitor (HPM) in the processor is useful for locating the cache misses, but is rarely used in the real world for various reasons. It would be better to find …
Parallel marking algorithms use multiple threads to walk through the object heap graph and mark each reachable object as live. Parallel marker threads mark an object "live" by atomically setting a bit in a mark-bitmap or a bit in the object header. Most of these parallel algorith…
We describe the Collie collector, a fully concurrent compacting collector that uses transactional memory techniques to achieve wait-free compaction. The collector uses compaction as the primary means of reclaiming unused memory, and performs "individual object transplantations" a…
Constantly increasing hardware parallelism poses more and more challenges to programmers and language designers. One approach to harness the massive parallelism is to move to task-based programming models that rely on runtime systems for dependency analysis and scheduling. Such m…
GPUs have become part of most commodity systems. Nonetheless, they are often underutilized when not executing graphics-intensive or special-purpose numerical computations, which are rare in consumer workloads. Emerging architectures, such as integrated CPU/GPU combinations, may c…
Points-to analysis is a key compiler analysis. Several memory related optimizations use points-to information to improve their effectiveness. Points-to analysis is performed by building a constraint graph of pointer variables and dynamically updating it to propagate more and more…
Browsers are the operating systems of the Web. They support a vast universe of applications written in a modern garbage-collected programming language. Browsers expose a rich platform API mostly implemented in C++. Browsers are also consumer software with low switching costs in a…
While often designed with a single language in mind, managed runtimes like the Java virtual machine (JVM) have become the target of not one but many languages, all of which benefit from the runtime's services. One of these services is automatic memory management. In this paper, w…
Reference counting and tracing are the two fundamental approaches that have underpinned garbage collection since 1960. However, despite some compelling advantages, reference counting is almost completely ignored in implementations of high performance systems today. In this paper …
Managed languages typically use read barriers to interpret forwarding pointers introduced to keep track of copied objects. For example, in a multicore environment with thread-local heaps and a global, shared heap, an object initially allocated on a local heap may be copied to a s…
Read and write barriers mediate access to the heap allowing the collector to control and monitor mutator actions. For this reason, barriers are a powerful tool in the design of any heap management algorithm, but the prevailing wisdom is that they impose significant costs. However…
As processors evolve towards higher core counts, architects will develop more sophisticated memory systems to satisfy the cores' increasing thirst for memory bandwidth. Early many-core processor designs suggest that future memory systems will likely include multiple controllers a…
Poor placement of data blocks in memory may negatively impact application performance because of an increase in the cache conflict miss rate [18]. For dynamically allocated structures this placement is typically determined by the memory allocator. Cache index-oblivious allocators…
We propose a new memory model called short-term memory for managing objects on the heap. In contrast to the traditional persistent memory model for heap management, objects in short-term memory expire after a finite amount of time, which makes deallocation unnecessary. Instead, e…
At the heart of all garbage collectors lies the process of identifying and processing reference fields within an object. Despite its key role, and evidence of many different implementation approaches, to our knowledge no comprehensive quantitative study of this design space exist…
The goal of cache management is to maximize data reuse. Collaborative caching provides an interface for software to communicate access information to hardware. In theory, it can obtain optimal cache performance.