Stopless: a real-time garbage collector for multiprocessors

ABSTRACT

We present Stopless: a concurrent real-time garbage collector suitable for modern multiprocessors running parallel multithreaded applications. Creating a garbage-collected environment that supports real-time on modern platforms is notoriously hard,especially if real-time implies lock-freedom. Known real-time collectors either restrict the real-time guarantees to uniprocessors only, rely on special hardware, or just give up supporting atomic operations (which are crucial for lock-free software). Stopless is the first collector that provides real-time responsiveness while preserving lock-freedom, supporting atomic operations, controlling fragmentation by compaction, and supporting modern parallel platforms. Stopless is adequate for modern languages such as C# or Java. It was implemented on top of the Bartok compiler and runtime for C# and measurements demonstrate high responsiveness (a factor of a 100 better than previously published systems), virtually no pause times, good mutator utilization, and acceptable overheads.

REFERENCES

• 1: Diab Abuaiadh , Yoav Ossia , Erez Petrank , Uri Silbershtein, An efficient parallel heap compaction algorithm, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, October 24-28, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• 2: Matthew Arnold , Barbara G. Ryder, A framework for reducing the cost of instrumented code, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.168-179, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 3: David F. Bacon , Perry Cheng , V. T. Rajan, A real-time garbage collector with low overhead and consistent utilization, Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.285-298, January 15-17, 2003, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• 4: Henry G. Baker, Jr., List processing in real time on a serial computer, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.4, p.280-294, April 1978 [doi>10.1145/359460.359470]
• 5: Katherine Barabash , Ori Ben-Yitzhak , Irit Goft , Elliot K. Kolodner , Victor Leikehman , Yoav Ossia , Avi Owshanko , Erez Petrank, A parallel, incremental, mostly concurrent garbage collector for servers, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.27 n.6, p.1097-1146, November 2005 [doi>10.1145/1108970.1108972]
• 6: Stephen M. Blackburn , Antony L. Hosking, Barriers: friend or foe?, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management, October 24-25, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada [doi>10.1145/1029873.1029891]
• 7: Guy E. Blelloch , Perry Cheng, On bounding time and space for multiprocessor garbage collection, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1999 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.104-117, May 01-04, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• 8: Hans-J. Boehm , Alan J. Demers , Scott Shenker, Mostly parallel garbage collection, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.26 n.6, p.157-164, June 1991
• 9: Rodney A. Brooks, Trading data space for reduced time and code space in real-time garbage collection on stock hardware, Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming, p.256-262, August 06-08, 1984, Austin, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/800055.802042]
• 10: Perry Cheng , Guy E. Blelloch, A parallel, real-time garbage collector, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.125-136, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 11: Cliff Click , Gil Tene , Michael Wolf, The pauseless GC algorithm, Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments, June 11-12, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA [doi>10.1145/1064979.1064988]
• 12: Edsger W. Dijkstra , Leslie Lamport , A. J. Martin , C. S. Scholten , E. F. M. Steffens, On-the-fly garbage collection: an exercise in cooperation, Communications of the ACM, v.21 n.11, p.966-975, Nov. 1978 [doi>10.1145/359642.359655]
• 13: Damien Doligez , Georges Gonthier, Portable, unobtrusive garbage collection for multiprocessor systems, Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.70-83, January 16-19, 1994, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/174675.174673]
• 14: Damien Doligez , Xavier Leroy, A concurrent, generational garbage collector for a multithreaded implementation of ML, Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.113-123, March 1993, Charleston, South Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/158511.158611]
• 15: Tamar Domani , Elliot K. Kolodner , Erez Petrank, A generational on-the-fly garbage collector for Java, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2000 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.274-284, June 18-21, 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 16: Tamar Domani , Elliot K. Kolodner , Ethan Lewis , Eliot E. Salant , Katherine Barabash , Itai Lahan , Yossi Levanoni , Erez Petrank , Igor Yanorer, Implementing an on-the-fly garbage collector for Java, Proceedings of the 2nd international symposium on Memory management, p.155-166, October 15-16, 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 17: Timothy L. Harris , Keir Fraser , Ian A. Pratt, A Practical Multi-word Compare-and-Swap Operation, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing, p.265-279, October 28-30, 2002
• 18: Roger Henriksson. Predictable automatic memory management for embedded systems. In OOPSLA '97 Workshop on Garbage Collection and Memory Management.
• 19: Roger Henriksson. Scheduling Garbage Collection in Embedded Systems. PhD thesis, Lund Institute of Technology, July 1998.
• 20: M. P. Herlihy , J. E. B. Moss, Lock-Free Garbage Collection for Multiprocessors, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, v.3 n.3, p.304-311, May 1992 [doi>10.1109/71.139204]
• 21: Richard L. Hudson , J. Eliot B. Moss, Sapphire: copying GC without stopping the world, Proceedings of the 2001 joint ACM-ISCOPE conference on Java Grande, p.48-57, June 2001, Palo Alto, California, United States [doi>10.1145/376656.376810]
• 22: Richard E. Jones. Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management. Wiley, Chichester, July 1996. With a chapter on Distributed Garbage Collection by R. Lins.
• 23: Haim Kermany , Erez Petrank, The Compressor: concurrent, incremental, and parallel compaction, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 11-14, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• 24: Yossi Levanoni , Erez Petrank, An on-the-fly reference counting garbage collector for Java, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.367-380, October 14-18, 2001, Tampa Bay, FL, USA
• 25: Henry Massalin , Calton Pu, A Lock-Free Multiprocessor OS Kernel, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.26 n.2, p.108, April 1992
• 26: Matthias Meyer, A true hardware read barrier, Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Memory management, June 10-11, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada [doi>10.1145/1133956.1133959]
• 27: Scott Nettles , James O'Toole, Real-time replication garbage collection, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.217-226, June 21-25, 1993, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
• 28: Yoav Ossia , Ori Ben-Yitzhak , Irit Goft , Elliot K. Kolodner , Victor Leikehman , Avi Owshanko, A parallel, incremental and concurrent GC for servers, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 29: Tony Printezis , David Detlefs, A generational mostly-concurrent garbage collector, Proceedings of the 2nd international symposium on Memory management, p.143-154, October 15-16, 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
• 30: Sven G. Robertz, Applying priorities to memory allocation, Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on Memory management, June 20-21, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 31: Sven Gestegård Robertz and Roger Henriksson. Time--triggered garbage collection -- robust and adaptive real--time GC scheduling for embedded systems. In LCTES 2003.
• 32: Daniel Spoonhower , Joshua Auerbach , David F. Bacon , Perry Cheng , David Grove, Eventrons: a safe programming construct for high-frequency hard real-time applications, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 11-14, 2006, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• 33: Guy L. Steele, Jr., Multiprocessing compactifying garbage collection, Communications of the ACM, v.18 n.9, p.495-508, Sept. 1975 [doi>10.1145/361002.361005]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.0 GENERAL

General Terms:
Algorithms, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
concurrency, garbage collection, lock-free, real-time