The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

With the rapid development of parallel platforms, optimistic methods become increasingly common. However, existing memory management schemes for such algorithms imposes high performance overhead and are considered notoriously complex. In this talk, I will describe how memory management can benefit from optimistic methods. I will start by presenting a memory reclamation scheme for lock-free data structures, which operates by turning all reads into optimistic ones. This resulting lock-free scheme is easy to incorporate, imposes low overhead, and is highly scalable. I will then show how to use optimistic techniques to improve garbage collection performance and scalability.