MMT: Exploiting fine-grained parallelism in dynamic memory management

Dynamic memory management is one of the most expensive but ubiquitous operations in many C/C++ applications. Additional features such as security checks, while desirable, further worsen memory management overheads. With advent of multicore architecture, it is important to investigate how dynamic memory management overheads for sequential applications can be reduced. In this paper, we propose a new approach for accelerating dynamic memory management on multicore architecture, by offloading dynamic management functions to a separate thread that we refer to as memory management thread (MMT). We show that an efficient MMT design can give significant performance improvement by extracting parallelism while being agnostic to the underlying memory management library algorithms and data structures. We also show how parallelism provided by MMT can be beneficial for high overhead memory management tasks, for example, security checks related to memory management. We evaluate MMT on heap allocation...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Devesh Tiwari, Sanghoon Lee, James Tuck, Yan Solihin
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Dynamic Memory Management, IPPS 2010, Memory Management, Multicore Architecture