Enhancing Garbage Collection Synchronization using Explicit Bit Barriers
Paper in proceeding, 2015

Multicore architectures offer a convenient way to unlock concurrency between application (called mutator) and garbage collector, yet efficient synchronization between the two by means of barriers is critical to unlock this concurrency. Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM), now commercially available, opens up new ways for synchronization with dramatically lower overhead for the mutator. Unfortunately, HTM-based schemes proposed to date either require specialized hardware support or impose severe overhead through invocation of OS-level trap handlers. This paper proposes Explicit Bit Barriers (EBB), a novel approach for fast synchronization between the mutator and HTM-encapsulated relocation tasks. We compare the efficiency of EBBs with read barriers based on virtual memory that rely on OS-level trap handlers. We show that EBBs are nearly as efficient as those needing specialized hardware, but run on commodity Intel processors with TSX extensions.

Author

Jochen Hollmann

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Ruben Titos Gil

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Per Stenström

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

44th International Conference on Parallel Processing, ICPP 2015, Beijing, China, 1-4 September

0190-3918 (ISSN)

Vol. 2015-December 769 - 778
978-146737587-0 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/ICPP.2015.86

ISBN

978-146737587-0

More information

Latest update

7/12/2024