Caching considerations for generational garbage collection

Wilson, Paul R.; Lam, Michael S.; Moher, Tom

doi:10.1145/141471.141500

Cited by 45 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Although there has been a large amount of experimental work on showing how good garbage collection can lead to efficient use of caches and disks ( [7,8,12,23] and many references in [14]), we know of none that try to prove bounds for algorithms for functional programs when manipulating recursive data types such as lists or trees. Abello et.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cache and I/O efficent functional algorithms

Blelloch

Harper

2013

Proceedings of the 40th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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The widely studied I/O and ideal-cache models were developed to account for the large difference in costs to access memory at different levels of the memory hierarchy. Both models are based on a two level memory hierarchy with a fixed size primary memory (cache) of size M , an unbounded secondary memory organized in blocks of size B. The cost measure is based purely on the number of block transfers between the primary and secondary memory. All other operations are free. Many algorithms have been analyzed in these models and indeed these models predict the relative performance of algorithms much more accurately than the standard RAM model. The models, however, require specifying algorithms at a very low level requiring the user to carefully lay out their data in arrays in memory and manage their own memory allocation.In this paper we present a cost model for analyzing the memory efficiency of algorithms expressed in a simple functional language. We show how some algorithms written in standard forms using just lists and trees (no arrays) and requiring no explicit memory layout or memory management are efficient in the model. We then describe an implementation of the language and show provable bounds for mapping the cost in our model to the cost in the idealcache model. These bound imply that purely functional programs based on lists and trees with no special attention to any details of memory layout can be as asymptotically as efficient as the carefully designed imperative I/O efficient algorithms. For example we describe an O( n B log M/B n B ) cost sorting algorithm, which is optimal in the ideal cache and I/O models.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it is known experimentally that by using certain standard memory allocation schemes purely functional programs (no side effects) can be reasonably cache efficient with regards to both spatial and temporal locality [7,8,12,23]. We give two examples.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cache and I/O efficent functional algorithms

Blelloch

Harper

2013

Proceedings of the 40th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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“…Some prior work tries to understand and improve the cache behavior of heap loads by measuring the cache impact of garbage collection [12,18,23,30,32,33].…”

Section: Cache Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Static load classification for improving the value predictability of data-cache misses

2002

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While caches are effective at avoiding most main-memory accesses, the few remaining memory references are still expensive. Even one cache miss per one hundred accesses can double a program's execution time. To better tolerate the data-cache miss latency, architects have proposed various speculation mechanisms, including load-value prediction. A load-value predictor guesses the result of a load so that the dependent instructions can immediately proceed without having to wait for the memory access to complete.To use the prediction resources most effectively, speculation should be restricted to loads that are likely to miss in the cache and that are likely to be predicted correctly. Prior work has considered hardware-and profile-based methods to make these decisions. Our work focuses on making these decisions at compile time. We show that a simple compiler classification is effective at separating the loads that should be speculated from the loads that should not. We present results for a number of C and Java programs and demonstrate that our results are consistent across programming languages and across program inputs.

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“…However, a direct consequence of CGC is that the cache miss rate can be sharply reduced. Related problems of cache performance have been widely studied 23,17,25,11]. We h a ve simulated the cache performance of CGC based on an old experimental version of LVM 9].…”

Section: Chronological Garbage Collec-tionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient memory management in a merged heap/stack prolog machine

2000

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

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Traditional Prolog implementations are based on the stack/heap memory architecture: the stack holds local variables and control information, whereas the heap stores data objects which outlive procedure activations. A s t a c k frame can be deallocated when an activation ends while heap space can only be reclaimed on backtracking or by garbage collection. Conventional garbage collection methods may yield poor performance. In this paper, I present a n o vel memory management approach used in the implementation of Logic Virtual Machine (LVM). The LVM combines the stack and the heap into a single memory block for all dynamical memory requirements, supports coarse-grain two-stream uni cation, and embeds an e cient garbage collection algorithm, the Chronological Garbage Collection (CGC), to reclaim useless memory cells. An experimental LVM emulator has been implemented. Our experimental results show t h a t the proposed approach h a s l o w runtime overhead, good virtual memory and cache performance, and very short, evenly distributed pause times during garbage collection. Some benchmarks even revealed that the CGC not only improves the program's cache performance by more than enough to pay its own cost, but also improves the program execution performance which is competitive with the SICStus fastcode.

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Caching considerations for generational garbage collection

Abstract: Garbage-collected systems allocate and reuse memory cyclically; this imposes a cyclic pattern on memory accesses that has its own distinctive locality charac

Cited by 45 publications

References 12 publications

Cache and I/O efficent functional algorithms

Cache and I/O efficent functional algorithms

Static load classification for improving the value predictability of data-cache misses

Efficient memory management in a merged heap/stack prolog machine

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