ISMM

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Despite rapid increases in memory capacity, reconfigurable hardware is still programmed in a very low-level manner, generally without any dynamic allocation at all. This limits productivity especially as the larger chips encourage more and more complex ...