NUMA-aware memory manager with dominant-thread-based copying GC

Abstract

We propose a novel online method of identifying the preferred NUMA nodes for objects with negligible overhead during the garbage collection time as well as object allocation time. Since the number of CPUs (or NUMA nodes) is increasing recently, it is critical for the memory manager of the runtime environment of an object-oriented language to exploit the low latency of local memory for high performance. To locate the CPU of a thread that frequently accesses an object, prior research uses the runtime information about memory accesses as sampled by the hardware. However, the overhead of this approach is high for a garbage collector.