ITR/SY: A High Performance Memory Manager for Multithreaded Applications

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Abstract:Recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user interfacesand object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become morememory intensive. These applications tend to allocate dynamic memoryprolifically. Moreover, automatic dynamic memory reclamation (garbagecollection, GC) has become a popular feature in modern programminglanguages such as Java. As a result, the time consumed by dynamic storagemanagement can be up to one-third of the program execution time. TheDynamic Memory Management Unit (DMMU), a special-purpose hardwaremechanism based on bitmaps and combinational logic can greatly diminishthis overhead. The preliminary results show that the hit ratio for 2Kbits and 8 Kbits buffer range from 84-99% and 95-99%, respectively. Thehardware complexity of the proposed scheme is O(n), where n is the size ofthe bit-vector. For a design with 20K gates and 97% miss rate, the overallspeedup can be as high as 1.41. This proposal calls for the integration ofthis hardware unit into SMP systems, which would allow concurrent garbagecollection in multithreaded-multiprocessors environments. This can speedup the performance of server applications written in Object-orientedlanguages such as C++ and Java. Additionally, this proposal also callsfor the study of garbage collection triggering points. The preliminarystudy indicates that time-based triggering point may yield higher garbagecollection efficiency than the traditional space-based approach.