Exploration of memory hierarchy configurations for efficient garbage collection on high-performance embedded systems

Modern embedded devices (e.g., PDAs, mobile phones) are now incorporating Java as a very popular implementation language in their designs. These new embedded systems include multiple applications that are dynamically launched by the user, which can produce very energy-hungry systems if the interactions between the applications and the garbage collectors (GCs) are not properly understood. In this paper we present a complete exploration, from an energy viewpoint, of the different possibilities of memory hierarchies for high-performance embedded systems when used by state-of-the-art GCs. Moreover, we explore the potential peformance improvement and energy reductions of using a scratchpad memory directed by the virtual machine to store critical code and data structures of the GCs; thus, enabling up to 40% performance improvements and 41% leakage reduction with respect to classical cache-based memory architectures. Our experimental results show that the key for an efficient low-power imple...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLVLSI
• Authors: José Manuel Velasco, David Atienza, Katzalin Olcoz
• Keywords: Embedded Systems, GLVLSI 2009, Memory Architecture, Modern Embedded Devices, VLSI