Threaded Dynamic Memory Management in Many-Core Processors

—Current trends in desktop processor design have been toward many-core solutions with increased parallelism. As the number of supported threads grows in these processors, it may prove difficult to exploit them on the commodity desktop. This paper presents a study that explores the spawning of the dynamic memory management activities into a separately executing thread that runs concurrently with the main program thread. Our approach works without requiring modifications to the original source program by redefining the dynamic link path to capture malloc and free calls in a threading dynamic memory management library. The routines of this library are setup so that the initial call to malloc triggers the creation of a thread for dynamic memory management; successive calls to malloc and free will trigger coordination with this thread for dynamic memory management activities. Our preliminary studies show that we can transparently redefine the dynamic memory management activities and w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CISIS
• Authors: Edward C. Herrmann, Philip A. Wilsey
• Keywords: CISIS 2010, Dynamic Memory Management, Memory Management Activities, Software Engineering, Threading Dynamic Memory