Topology-Aware Parallelism for NUMA Copying Collectors

Abstract. NUMA-aware parallel algorithms in runtime systems attempt to improve locality by allocating memory from local NUMA nodes. Re-searchers have suggested that the garbage collector should profile mem-ory access patterns or use object locality heuristics to determine the tar-get NUMA node before moving an object. However, these solutions are costly when applied to every live object in the reference graph. Our earlier research suggests that connected objects represented by the rooted sub-graphs provide abundant locality and they are appropriate for NUMA architecture. In this paper, we utilize the intrinsic locality of rooted sub-graphs to improve parallel copying collector performance. Our new topology-aware parallel copying collector preserves rooted sub-graph integrity by moving the connected objects as a unit to the target NUMA node. In addition, it distributes and assigns the copying tasks to appropriate (i.e. NUMA node local) GC threads. For load balancing, our solution enforces locality on the work-stealing mechanism by stealing from local NUMA nodes only. We evaluated our approach on SPECjbb2013, DaCapo 9.12 and Neo4j. Results show an improvement in GC performance by up to 2.5x speedup and 37 % better application performance

Hierarchical Memory Management for Parallel Programs

International audienceAn important feature of functional programs is that they are parallel by default. Implementing an efficient parallel functional language, however, is a major challenge, in part because the high rate of allocation and freeing associated with functional programs requires an efficient and scalable memory manager. In this paper, we present a technique for parallel memory management for strict functional languages with nested parallelism. At the highest level of abstraction, the approach consists of a technique to organize memory as a hierarchy of heaps, and an algorithm for performing automatic memory reclamation by taking advantage of a disentanglement property of parallel functional programs. More specifically, the idea is to assign to each parallel task its own heap in memory and organize the heaps in a hierarchy/tree that mirrors the hierarchy of tasks. We present a nested-parallel calculus that specifies hierarchical heaps and prove in this calculus a disentanglement property, which prohibits a task from accessing objects allocated by another task that might execute in parallel. Leveraging the disentanglement property, we present a garbage collection technique that can operate on any subtree in the memory hierarchy concurrently as other tasks (and/or other collections) proceed in parallel. We prove the safety of this collector by formalizing it in the context of our parallel calculus. In addition, we describe how the proposed techniques can be implemented on modern shared-memory machines and present a prototype implementation as an extension to MLton, a high-performance compiler for the Standard ML language. Finally, we evaluate the performance of this implementation on a number of parallel benchmarks

Parallel Garbage Collection for Shared Memory Multiprocessors

We present a multiprocessor "stop-the-world" garbage collection framework that provides multiple forms of load balancing. Our parallel collectors use this framework to balance the work of root scanning, using static overpartitioning, andalsotobalance the work of tracing the object graph, using a form of dynamic load balancing called work stealing. We describe two collectors written using this framework: pSemispaces, a parallel semispace collector, and pMarkcompact, a parallel markcompact collector