The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Computing environments become increasingly parallel, and it seems likely that we will see more cores on tomorrow's desktops and server platforms. In a highly parallel system, tracing garbage collectors may not scale well due to deep heap structures that hinder parallel tracing. In this work we start by analyzing which data structures make current Java benchmarks create deep heap shapes. It turns out that the problem is manifested mostly with benchmarks that employ queues and linked-lists. We then propose a new construction of the queue data structure with extra references that enables better garbage collector parallelism at a low overhead.