Simulation of High-Performance Memory Allocators

—Current general-purpose memory allocators do not provide sufficient speed or flexibility for modern highperformance applications. To optimize metrics like performance, memory usage and energy consumption, software engineers often write custom allocators from scratch, which is a difficult and error-prone process. In this paper, we present a flexible and efficient simulator to study Dynamic Memory Managers (DMMs), a composition of one or more memory allocators. This novel approach allows programmers to simulate custom and general DMMs, which can be composed without incurring any additional runtime overhead or additional programming cost. We show that this infrastructure simplifies DMM construction, mainly because the target application does not need to be compiled every time a new DMM must be evaluated. Within a search procedure, the system designer can choose the "best" allocator by simulation for a particular target application. In our evaluation, we show that our scheme w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DSD
• Authors: José Luis Risco-Martín, José Manuel Colmenar, David Atienza, José Ignacio Hidalgo
• Keywords: DSD 2010, General-purpose Memory Allocators, Hardware, Memory Allocators, Memory Usage