Hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection offers high throughput and small worst-case bounds on the times required to allocate dynamic objects and to access the memory contained within previously allocated objects. Whether the proposed technology is cost effective depends on various choices between configuration alternatives. This paper reports the performance of several different configurations of the hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection system subjected to several different workloads. Reported measurements demonstrate that hardware-assisted real-time garbage collection is a viable alternative to traditional explicit memory management techniques, even for low-level languages like C++.

Introduction Today's virtual machines use a layer of software that allows programs compiled in one instruction set to be executed on a processor executing a (different) native instruction set. Virtual machines have become popular in recent years for providing platform independence; however, virtual machines also open many new opportunities for enhancing performance. The co-design of virtual machine software and the underlying hardware microarchitecture will enable enhanced instruction level parallelism and more adaptable performance mechanisms than are possible when hardware and application software are separated by instruction set architectures as is traditionally done. In future high performance computers, a virtual instruction set architecture (V-ISA) will be the level for maintaining architectural compatibility. The V-ISA will be implemented with a virtual machine that blends software and hardware in a symbiotic manner via co-design. The hardware will support an implementationdep

Applications, and their associated programming models, have had a profound influence on computer architecture evolution. Programs developed in procedural languages (e.g., C and fortran) have traditionally served this role. The popularity of the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm has been growing rapidly, especially through the use of languages such as C++ and Java. OOP languages support the concepts of data encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance, which promise to increase code reuse and result in more reliable code. Applications developed in object oriented languages exhibit different execution behavior compared to their procedural language counterparts. We focus our work on two primary differences encountered as we move to applications developed in OO languages: i) the increased number of procedures and their higher calling frequencies, and ii) the increased use of indirect branches. Equipped with a set of C and C++ benchmark applications, we propose microarchitectural m...