Hardware support for concurrent garbage collection in SMP systems

Abstract

In this paper we propose a heap partitioning scheme that can eliminate heap contentions in multithreaded applications. Heap partitioning allows each CPU to have its own heap space (called sub-heap). Thus, the heap contention can be completely eliminated. The proposed scheme utilizes the dynamic memory management unit (DMMU), a high-performance memory manager, to manage the sub-heap space assigned to each CPU. Programmers can make requests to allocate dynamic memory through h-malloc instruction extension. To perform garbage collection, programmers can invoke mark and sweep instruction extensions. The proposed scheme allows each thread to perform allocation and garbage collection concurrently and independently from one another.