XMem: type-safe, transparent, shared memory for cross-runtime communication and coordination

ABSTRACT

Developers commonly build contemporary enterprise applications using type-safe, component-based platforms, such as J2EE, and architect them to comprise multiple tiers, such as a web container, application server, and database engine. Administrators increasingly execute each tier in its own managed runtime environment (MRE) to improve reliability and to manage system complexity through the fault containment and modularity offered by isolated MRE instances. Such isolation, however, necessitates expensive cross-tier communication based on protocols such as object serialization and remote procedure calls. Administrators commonly co-locate communicating MREs on a single host to reduce communication overhead and to better exploit increasing numbers of available processing cores. However, state-of-the-art MREs offer no support for more efficient communication between co-located MREs, while fast inter-process communication mechanisms, such as shared memory, are widely available as a standard operating system service on most modern platforms.

To address this growing need, we present the design and implementation of XMem ? type-safe, transparent, shared memory support for co-located MREs. XMem guarantees type-safety through coordinated, parallel, multi-process class loading and garbage collection. To avoid introducing any level of indirection, XMem manipulates virtual memory mapping. In addition, object sharing in XMem is fully transparent: shared objects are identical to local objects in terms of field access, synchronization, garbage collection, and method invocation, with the only difference being that sharedto-private pointers are disallowed. XMem facilitates easy integration and use by existing communication technologies and software systems, such as RMI, JNDI, JDBC, serialization/XML, and network sockets.

We have implemented XMem in the open-source, productionquality HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. Our experimental evaluation, based on core communication technologies underlying J2EE, as well as using open-source server applications, indicates that XMem significantly improves throughput and response time by avoiding the overheads imposed by object serialization and network communication.

REFERENCES

• 1: Apache Tomcat. http://tomcat.apache.org.
• 2: Yariv Aridor , Michael Factor , Avi Teperman, cJVM: A Single System Image of a JVM on a Cluster, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Parallel Processing, p.4, September 21-24, 1999
• 3: Joe Armstrong , Robert Virding , Claes Wikström , Mike Williams, Concurrent programming in ERLANG (2nd ed.), Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd., Hertfordshire, UK, 1996
• 4: Godmar Back , Wilson C. Hsieh , Jay Lepreau, Processes in KaffeOS: isolation, resource management, and sharing in java, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Symposium on Operating System Design & Implementation, p.23-23, October 22-25, 2000, San Diego, California
• 5: G. Back, P. Tullmann, L. Stoller, W. C. Hsieh, and J. Lepreau. Java operating systems: Design and implementation. Technical report, Univ. of Utah, 1998.
• 6: Henry G. Baker, Infant mortality and generational garbage collection, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.28 n.4, p.55-57, April 1993 [doi>10.1145/152739.152747]
• 7: Dirk Balfanz , Li Gong, Experience with Secure Multi-Processing in Java, Proceedings of the The 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, p.398, May 26-29, 1998
• 8: BEA WebLogic Application Server. http://www.bea.com.
• 9: B. N. Bershad , S. Savage , P. Pardyak , E. G. Sirer , M. E. Fiuczynski , D. Becker , C. Chambers , S. Eggers, Extensibility safety and performance in the SPIN operating system, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.267-283, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• 10: Fabian Breg , Constantine D. Polychronopoulos, Java virtual machine support for object serialization, Proceedings of the 2001 joint ACM-ISCOPE conference on Java Grande, p.173-180, June 2001, Palo Alto, California, United States [doi>10.1145/376656.376846]
• 11: Ciarán Bryce , Chrislain Razafimahefa, An approach to safe object sharing, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.35 n.10, p.367-381, Oct. 2000
• 12: X. Chen and V. H. Allan. MultiJav: A distributed shared memory system based on multiple Java virtual machines. In PDPTA, 1998.
• 13: 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]
• 14: CORBA Specification. http://www.omg.org.
• 15: D. E. Culler, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, S. C. Goldstein, A. Krishnamurthy, S. Lumetta, T. von Eicken, and K. A. Yelick. Parallel programming in Split-C. In SC, 1993.
• 16: D. E. Culler, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, S. C. Goldstein, A. Krishnamurthy, S. Lumetta, T. von Eicken, and K. A. Yelick. Parallel programming in Split-C. In SC, 1993.
• 17: Grzegorz Czajkowski , Laurent Daynés, Multitasking without comprimise: a virtual machine evolution, Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.125-138, October 14-18, 2001, Tampa Bay, FL, USA
• 18: The DaCapo benchmarks. http://dacapobench.org.
• 19: David Detlefs , Christine Flood , Steve Heller , Tony Printezis, Garbage-first garbage collection, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management, October 24-25, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada [doi>10.1145/1029873.1029879]
• 20: Sean Dorward , Rob Pike , David Leo Presotto , Dennis Ritchie , Howard Trickey , Phil Winterbottom, Inferno, Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE International Computer Conference, p.241, February 23-26, 1997
• 21: T. El-Ghazawi, W. Carlson, and J. Draper. UPC Language Specifications V, 2001.
• 22: Manuel Fähndrich , Mark Aiken , Chris Hawblitzel , Orion Hodson , Galen Hunt , James R. Larus , Steven Levi, Language support for fast and reliable message-based communication in singularity OS, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006, April 18-21, 2006, Leuven, Belgium
• 23: Christine H. Flood , David Detlefs , Nir Shavit , Xiaolan Zhang, Parallel garbage collection for shared memory multiprocessors, Proceedings of the 2001 Symposium on Java^TM Virtual Machine Research and Technology Symposium, p.21-21, April 23-24, 2001, Monterey, California
• 24: Eric Freeman , Ken Arnold , Susanne Hupfer, JavaSpaces Principles, Patterns, and Practice, Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd., Essex, UK, 1999
• 25: Michael Golm , Meik Felser , Christian Wawersich , Jürgen Kleinöder, The JX Operating System, Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.45-58, June 10-15, 2002
• 26: Matthew Hertz , Yi Feng , Emery D. Berger, Garbage collection without paging, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 12-15, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
• 27: C. A. R. Hoare, Communicating sequential processes, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.1, p.100-106, Jan. 1983 [doi>10.1145/357980.358021]
• 28: HotSpot Java Virtual Machine GC. http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/hotspot.
• 29: Hsqldb. http://www.hsqldb.org.
• 30: Galen C. Hunt , James R. Larus, Singularity: rethinking the software stack, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.41 n.2, p.37-49, April 2007 [doi>10.1145/1243418.1243424]
• 31: Isolate API. JSR-121. http://jcp.org.
• 32: Java 2 Enterprise Edition. http://java.sun.com/javaee/.
• 33: JavaOS : A Standalone Java Environment. Sun Microsystems, 1996.
• 34: JBoss Enterprise Middleware. http://www.jboss.com.
• 35: JNode. http://www.jnode.org.
• 36: R. Jones and C. Ryder. Garbage collection should be lifetime aware. In ICOOOLPS, 2006.
• 37: Richard Jones , Rafael Lins, Garbage collection: algorithms for automatic dynamic memory management, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1996
• 38: 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
• 39: Sheng Liang , Gilad Bracha, Dynamic class loading in the Java virtual machine, Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.36-44, October 18-22, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 40: Matchy J. M. Ma , Cho-Li Wang , Francis C. M. Lau, JESSICA: Java-enabled single-system-image computing architecture, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, v.60 n.10, p.1194-1222, Oct 2000 [doi>10.1006/jpdc.2000.1650]
• 41: Efficient Java RMI for parallel programming, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), v.23 n.6, p.747-775, November 2001 [doi>10.1145/506315.506317]
• 42: Mark W. MacBeth , Keith A. McGuigan , Philip J. Hatcher, Executing Java threads in parallel in a distributed-memory environment, Proceedings of the 1998 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, p.16, November 30-December 03, 1998, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 43: Jeremy Manson , William Pugh , Sarita V. Adve, The Java memory model, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.40 n.1, p.378-391, January 2005
• 44: Michael Nelson , Beng-Hong Lim , Greg Hutchins, Fast transparent migration for virtual machines, Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p.25-25, April 10-15, 2005, Anaheim, CA
• 45: Inmos Corp, Occam Programming Manual, Prentice Hall Trade, 1984
• 46: Open Source J2SE. http://openjdk.java.net.
• 47: Steven Osman , Dinesh Subhraveti , Gong Su , Jason Nieh, The design and implementation of Zap: a system for migrating computing environments, Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

  , December 09-11, 2002, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1060289.1060323]
• 48: Yoav Ossia , Ori Ben-Yitzhak , Marc Segal, Mostly concurrent compaction for mark-sweep GC, Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management, October 24-25, 2004, Vancouver, BC, Canada [doi>10.1145/1029873.1029877]
• 49: M. Perry. Shared Memory Under Linux, 1999. http://fscked.org/writings/SHM/shm.html.
• 50: M. Philippsen andM. Zenger. JavaParty?transparent remote objects in Java. Concurrency: Practice and Experience, 9(11), 1997.
• 51: Java RMI Specification. http://java.sun.com.
• 52: Kenneth Russell , David Detlefs, Eliminating synchronization-related atomic operations with biased locking and bulk rebiasing, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.41 n.10, October 2006
• 53: Fred B. Schneider , J. Gregory Morrisett , Robert Harper, A Language-Based Approach to Security, Informatics - 10 Years Back. 10 Years Ahead., p.86-101, January 2001
• 54: Java Object Serialization Specification. http://java.sun.com.
• 55: SPEC. http://www.spec.org.
• 56: Darko Stefanović , Matthew Hertz , Stephen M. Blackburn , Kathryn S. McKinley , J. Eliot B. Moss, Older-first garbage collection in practice: evaluation in a Java Virtual Machine, Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Memory system performance, p.25-36, June 16-16, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 57: Takashi Suezawa, Persistent execution state of a Java virtual machine, Proceedings of the ACM 2000 conference on Java Grande, p.160-167, June 03-04, 2000, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/337449.337536]
• 58: David Ungar, Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.19 n.5, p.157-167, May 1984
• 59: Thorsten von Eicken , Chi-Chao Chang , Grzegorz Czajkowski , Chris Hawblitzel , Deyu Hu , Dan Spoonhower, J-Kernel: a capability-based operating system for Java, Secure Internet programming: security issues for mobile and distributed objects, Springer-Verlag, London, 2001
• 60: IBM WebSphere Application Server. http://www.ibm.com.
• 61: Michal Wegiel , Chandra Krintz, The mapping collector: virtual memory support for generational, parallel, and concurrent compaction, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, March 01-05, 2008, Seattle, WA, USA
• 62: P. R. Wilson. Uniprocessor garbage collection techniques. Technical report, Univ. of Texas, 1994.
• 63: Paul R. Wilson , Mark S. Johnstone , Michael Neely , David Boles, Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Memory Management, p.1-116, September 27-29, 1995
• 64: P. R. Wilson , T. G. Moher, A “card-marking” scheme for controlling intergenerational references in generation-based garbage collection on stock hardware, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.24 n.5, p.87-92, May 1989 [doi>10.1145/66068.66077]
• 65: Niklaus Wirth , Jürg Gutknecht, Project Oberon: the design of an operating system and compiler, ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 1992
• 66: Ting Yang , Emery D. Berger , Scott F. Kaplan , J. Eliot B. Moss, CRAMM: virtual memory support for garbage-collected applications, Proceedings of the 7th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation, November 06-08, 2006, Seattle, Washington
• 67: W. Yu and A. L. Cox. Java/DSM: A platform for heterogeneous computing. Concurrency - Practice and Experience, 9(11), 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Dynamic storage management

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Classes and objects
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Optimization; Compilers; Run-time environments; Memory management (garbage collection)

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages, Management, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
class loading, garbage collection, interprocess communication, managed runtimes, parallel, shared memory, synchronization, transparent, type-safe