Tracing garbage collection on highly parallel platforms

Abstract

The pervasiveness of multiprocessor and multicore hardware and the rising level of available parallelism are radically changing the computing landscape. Can software deal with tomorrow's potential higher parallelism? In this paper we study this issue from the garbage collection perspective. In particular, we investigate the scalability of parallel heap tracing, which stands at the core of the garbage collection activity. Heap shapes can be sequential in nature, and prevent the collector from scaling the trace. We start by proposing the idealized trace utilization as a scalability measure for evaluating the scalability of a given heap shape. We then examine standard Java benchmarks and evaluate the existence of non-scalable object-graph shapes in their execution. Next, we propose and implement a prototype of garbage collection techniques that attempt to ameliorate the object-graph shape problem. Finally, we measure and report their efficacy.