Real-Time Concurrent Garbage Collection

Creating a garbage-collected environment that supports real-time on modern parallel platforms is notoriously hard, especially if real-time entails lock-freedom. I will present and compare three alternative designs for a highly-responsive, concurrent, lock-free, and low-overhead real-time garbage collector. Next, a simple and effective compiler optimization aimed at reducing the overhead of memory barriers will be presented. Finally, if time allows, I will introduce our formalization of lock-freedom and lock-free supporting systems.

All our designs are adequate for modern languages such as C# or Java. We have implemented them on top of the Bartok compiler and runtime for C# and measurements demonstrate high responsiveness (a factor of a 100 better than previously published real-time systems), virtually no pause times, good mutator utilization, and acceptable overheads.

Speaker Details

Erez Petrank is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Technion, currently on a sabbatical leave at MSR. His current research focus is on memory management, programming languages, and parallel computation. Previously, he was engaged in constructing cryptographic primitives, protocols, and lower bounds. Erez received his Ph.D. from the Technion. He was a visiting researcher in the University of Toronto, Rutgers University, Princeton University, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research. He was awarded the IBM Research Division Award (twice), the Salomon Simon Mani Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Rothschild Post-Doctoral fellowship, the Miriam and Aaron Gutwirt Special Scholarship, and the Technion Award for High Excellence in Teaching (5 times). Erez holds 9 patents, one of which was listed among the 10% most profitable IBM patents for 2002. His research has been funded by Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and the Israel Science Foundation.

Date:
Speakers:
Erez Petrank
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research (on a sabbatical leave from the Technion)