10,244 research outputs found
Lock-free atom garbage collection for multithreaded Prolog
The runtime system of dynamic languages such as Prolog or Lisp and their
derivatives contain a symbol table, in Prolog often called the atom table. A
simple dynamically resizing hash-table used to be an adequate way to implement
this table. As Prolog becomes fashionable for 24x7 server processes we need to
deal with atom garbage collection and concurrent access to the atom table.
Classical lock-based implementations to ensure consistency of the atom table
scale poorly and a stop-the-world approach to implement atom garbage collection
quickly becomes a bottle-neck, making Prolog unsuitable for soft real-time
applications. In this article we describe a novel implementation for the atom
table using lock-free techniques where the atom-table remains accessible even
during atom garbage collection. Relying only on CAS (Compare And Swap) and not
on external libraries, the implementation is straightforward and portable.
Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.Comment: Paper presented at the 32nd International Conference on Logic
Programming (ICLP 2016), New York City, USA, 16-21 October 2016, 14 pages,
LaTeX, 4 PDF figure
Formal Derivation of Concurrent Garbage Collectors
Concurrent garbage collectors are notoriously difficult to implement
correctly. Previous approaches to the issue of producing correct collectors
have mainly been based on posit-and-prove verification or on the application of
domain-specific templates and transformations. We show how to derive the upper
reaches of a family of concurrent garbage collectors by refinement from a
formal specification, emphasizing the application of domain-independent design
theories and transformations. A key contribution is an extension to the
classical lattice-theoretic fixpoint theorems to account for the dynamics of
concurrent mutation and collection.Comment: 38 pages, 21 figures. The short version of this paper appeared in the
Proceedings of MPC 201
Emulating and evaluating hybrid memory for managed languages on NUMA hardware
Non-volatile memory (NVM) has the potential to become a mainstream memory technology and challenge DRAM. Researchers evaluating the speed, endurance, and abstractions of hybrid memories with DRAM and NVM typically use simulation, making it easy to evaluate the impact of different hardware technologies and parameters. Simulation is, however, extremely slow, limiting the applications and datasets in the evaluation. Simulation also precludes critical workloads, especially those written in managed languages such as Java and C#. Good methodology embraces a variety of techniques for evaluating new ideas, expanding the experimental scope, and uncovering new insights.
This paper introduces a platform to emulate hybrid memory for managed languages using commodity NUMA servers. Emulation complements simulation but offers richer software experimentation. We use a thread-local socket to emulate DRAM and a remote socket to emulate NVM. We use standard C library routines to allocate heap memory on the DRAM and NVM sockets for use with explicit memory management or garbage collection. We evaluate the emulator using various configurations of write-rationing garbage collectors that improve NVM lifetimes by limiting writes to NVM, using 15 applications and various datasets and workload configurations. We show emulation and simulation confirm each other's trends in terms of writes to NVM for different software configurations, increasing our confidence in predicting future system effects. Emulation brings novel insights, such as the non-linear effects of multi-programmed workloads on NVM writes, and that Java applications write significantly more than their C++ equivalents. We make our software infrastructure publicly available to advance the evaluation of novel memory management schemes on hybrid memories
Automated Verification of Practical Garbage Collectors
Garbage collectors are notoriously hard to verify, due to their low-level
interaction with the underlying system and the general difficulty in reasoning
about reachability in graphs. Several papers have presented verified
collectors, but either the proofs were hand-written or the collectors were too
simplistic to use on practical applications. In this work, we present two
mechanically verified garbage collectors, both practical enough to use for
real-world C# benchmarks. The collectors and their associated allocators
consist of x86 assembly language instructions and macro instructions, annotated
with preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions. We used the
Boogie verification generator and the Z3 automated theorem prover to verify
this assembly language code mechanically. We provide measurements comparing the
performance of the verified collector with that of the standard Bartok
collectors on off-the-shelf C# benchmarks, demonstrating their competitiveness
System Description for a Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Distributed Garbage Collector
We describe an efficient and fault-tolerant algorithm for distributed cyclic
garbage collection. The algorithm imposes few requirements on the local
machines and allows for flexibility in the choice of local collector and
distributed acyclic garbage collector to use with it. We have emphasized
reducing the number and size of network messages without sacrificing the
promptness of collection throughout the algorithm. Our proposed collector is a
variant of back tracing to avoid extensive synchronization between machines. We
have added an explicit forward tracing stage to the standard back tracing stage
and designed a tuned heuristic to reduce the total amount of work done by the
collector. Of particular note is the development of fault-tolerant cooperation
between traces and a heuristic that aggressively reduces the set of suspect
objects.Comment: 47 pages, LaTe
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