GPUs as an opportunity for offloading garbage collection

Abstract

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 create an opportunity to utilize these otherwise unused cycles for offloading traditional systems tasks. Garbage collection appears to be a particularly promising candidate for offloading, due to the popularity of managed languages on consumer devices.