Hardware-Support for Common Garbage Collections

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25540019
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Computer system
• Research Institution: Nagoya Institute of Technology
• Principal Investigator: TSUMURA Tomoaki 名古屋工業大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 准教授 (00335233)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: ガベージコレクション / ハードウェア支援

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Many mobile systems have to achieve both high performance and low memory usage, and the total performance of the wide range of platforms now can be affected by the effectiveness of Garbage Collection (GC). GC algorithms have been actively studied and improved, but they still have not reached any fundamental solution. We focused on the point that the objects on the call stack should be traced in many GC algorithms, and proposed a hardware support technique for speed up of this trace. To trace objects, it is needed to find pointers on the call stack. Hence, we installed tables for managing all pointers on the call stack. By referring these tables, the GC routine can detect pointers immediately. The result of the simulation experiment shows the proposed method leads to low GC latency.

Free Research Field

計算機アーキテクチャ