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SUMMARY:On-the-fly garbage collection: issues and opportunities - Richard 
 Jones\, University of Kent
DTSTART:20140425T150000Z
DTEND:20140425T160000Z
UID:TALK48904@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jonathan Hayman
DESCRIPTION:The MirrorGC project is building on-the-fly\, concurrent\, cop
 ying garbage collectors. This work has exposed a number of issues and oppo
 rtunities. In this talk\, I provide a background to concurrent garbage col
 lection\, explaining the key issue of synchronisation\, either between par
 allel collector threads or between collector and mutator threads. I then f
 ocus on two issues: how to handle Java's weak references in an on-the-fly 
 collector and whether garbage collection can benefit from transactional me
 mory.\n\n\nJava's weak reference types require the garbage collector to pr
 ocess them atomically. However\, the implementor is not helped by the info
 rmal specification given only in the package documentation. We formalise t
 he specification\, investigate alternative implementations (which we model
  check)\, and demonstrate that an on-the-fly solution is competitive with 
 other approaches.\n\n\nIntel's latest processor microarchitecture\, Haswel
 l\, provides a restricted form of transactional memory. We explore how thi
 s can be applied to three garbage collection scenarios in Jikes RVM. We de
 monstrate gains in concurrent copying speed over traditional synchronisati
 on mechanisms of 48-101%. We also show how similar but portable performanc
 e gains can be achieved through software transactional memory techniques.
LOCATION:Auditorium\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 21 Station Road\, Cambridge
 \, CB1 2FB
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