[PRL] Real-Time Concurrent GC talk @ harvard

[shivers at ccs.neu.edu]

Today at 4:00. I will drive over, so can offer a lift to <= 3 people.
    -Olin

------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Greg Morrisett <greg at eecs.harvard.edu>
To: programming at eecs.harvard.edu,
 syrah at eecs.harvard.edu
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 13:16:38 -0400
Subject: PL Seminar: Erez Petrank (Technion & Microsoft) on 
         Real-Time Concurrent GC

I highly recommend the following talk tomorrow -- Erez is a smart
guy and his work on real-time garbage collection is really nice.

-Greg

Title: Real-Time Concurrent Garbage Collection
Speaker: Erez Petrank, Technion and Microsoft Research
Date: Wed 9 April 2008
Time: 4pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319

Abstract:

Creating a garbage-collected environment that supports real-time on  
modern parallel platforms is notoriously hard, especially if real-time  
entails lock-freedom. I will present and compare three alternative  
designs for a  highly-responsive, concurrent, lock-free, and low- 
overhead real-time garbage collector. Next, I will present a simple  
and effective compiler optimization aimed at reducing the overhead of  
memory barriers used with garbage collection. Finally, if time allows,  
I will introduce our formalization of lock-freedom and lock-free  
supporting systems.

All our designs are adequate for modern languages such as C# or Java.  
We have implemented them on top of the Bartok compiler and runtime for  
C# and measurements demonstrate high responsiveness (a factor of a 100  
better than previously published real-time systems), virtually no
pause times, good mutator utilization, and acceptable overheads.

Bio:

Erez is an associate professor in the Technion who is now on a  
sabbatical at Microsoft Research. He used to have a deep knowledge  
about zero knowledge but he now prefers to explore memory managers  
with zero pauses.