[Colloq] Felix Klock Thesis Proposal 5/7

[Patricia Freeman]

Felix Klock will be giving his PhD Thesis Proposal on Wednesday, May 7 at 1pm in 366WVH.


PhD Thesis Proposal announcement text
=====================================

STUDENT: Felix Klock

Title: 
Bounding Pause Times in a Regional Garbage Collector

Wednesday, May 7, 2008
1:00 PM
366 West Village H

Abstract
Garbage collectors that occasionally pause to collect the entire heap work well
enough for many applications, but collection pauses that take time proportional
to the total heap size can cause alarming or annoying delays, even if they 
occur rarely.  Real-time, incremental, and concurrent collectors eliminate such
delays but introduce complex invariants to the memory management system,
reducing application throughput.

We have designed a regional garbage collector that collects bounded subsets of
the heap during every collection, thus disentangling the worst-case mutator 
pause time from the total heap size.  The design isolates collection-related 
work not directly associated with moving objects; a separate processor core
can perform such work without direct interaction with the mutator thread.
I propose that the collector achieves worst case bounds on pause times, and if 
its concurrent tasks are run with sufficiently high priority, the collector 
provides competitive throughput while maintaining a worst case bound on overall 
memory usage.

Thesis committee members:
Prof. Will Clinger (advisor)
Prof. Gene Cooperman
Prof. Olin Shivers
Dr. Guy Steele (external member, Sun Microsystems Laboratories)