Declarative aspects of memory management in the concurrent collections parallel programming model

Concurrent Collections (CnC)[8] is a declarative parallel language that allows the application developer to express their parallel application as a collection of high-level computations called steps that communicate via single-assignment data structures called items. A CnC program is specified in two levels. At the bottom level, an existing imperative language implements the computations within the individual computation steps. At the top level, CnC describes the relationships (ordering constraints) among the steps. The memory management mechanism of the existing imperative language manages data whose lifetime is within a computation step. A key limitation in the use of CnC for long-running programs is the lack of memory management and garbage collection for data items with lifetimes that are longer than a single computation step. Although the goal here is the same as that of classical garbage collection, the nature of problem and therefore nature of the solution is distinct. The foc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Zoran Budimlic, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Kathleen Knobe, Geoff N. Lowney, Vivek Sarkar, Leo Treggiari
• Keywords: Computation Step, Data Items, Memory Management, POPL 2009, Programming Languages