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                    Seminar Announcement

            Department of Computer Science, FEIT
             The Australian National University
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Date:  Wednesday, 18 May 2005
Time:  4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Speaker: Dr. Steve Blackburn (DCS at ANU)

Title:   Next Generation Garbage Collection

Abstract:
The growing popularity of modern object object oriented languages such
as Java and C# has lead to a resurgence in interest in garbage
collection after many years of relative quiet.  A consequence of this
is that today's algorithms lean heavily on an intellectual base
developed twenty or more years ago.  Work by Collins (1960), McCarthy
(1960), Cheney (1970), Deutch and Bobrow (1976), and Ungar (1984)
remain key.  In the meantime the ground-rules have changed radically.
We now have L2 caches much larger than total memory on typical
machines of twenty or thirty years ago!

This talk will have two themes.  I will begin with "Myths and
Reality", the first detailed analysis of the memory performance of
garbage collectors on modern hardware (which appeared at SIGMETRICS
2004).  In this work we dispel a number of long standing myths and
confirm some popular folk-law.  In the second part of the talk I will
discuss "Modern Languages--Modern Caches?", new work which uses novel
techniques to analyze the cache performance of Java and C programs.
The results of this analysis have lead to new cache designs currently
under development.  Our initial results indicate that modest changes
to the architecture of modern caches can lead to substantial
reductions in L1 and L2 miss rates, and furthermore, speed up the
common case access time.  These preliminary results are promising in
terms of the potential to improve the wall clock performance of common
C and Java programs.

Biography:
    Steve Blackburn is a Research Fellow at ANU.  His interest lies
in the intersection of modern object oriented languages and modern
architectures.  He designed and maintains the MMTk memory management
toolkit with Perry Cheng and Kathryn McKinley, and is on the steering
committee and core team of the Jikes RVM research JVM.  In addition to
active involvement in the academic research community, he maintains
strong pragmatic focus through collaborations with IBM Research and
Microsoft Research.


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars05/dept20050518


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