GPUs have become part of most commodity systems. Nonetheless, they are often underutilized when not executing graphics-intensive or special-purpose numerical computations, which are rare in consumer workloads. Emerging architectures, such as integrated CPU\/GPU combinations, may create an opportunity to utilize these otherwise unused cycles for offloading traditional systems tasks. Garbage collection appears to be a particularly promising candidate for offloading, due to the popularity of managed languages on consumer devices. We investigate the challenges for offloading garbage collection to a GPU, by examining the performance trade-offs for the mark phase of a mark & sweep garbage collector. We present a theoretical analysis and an algorithm that demonstrates the feasibility of this approach. We also discuss a number of algorithmic design trade-offs required to leverage the strengths and capabilities of the GPU hardware. Our algorithm has been integrated into the Jikes RVM and we present promising performance results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GPUs have become part of most commodity systems. Nonetheless, they are often underutilized when not executing graphics-intensive or special-purpose numerical computations, which are rare in consumer workloads. Emerging architectures, such as integrated CPU\/GPU combinations, may create an opportunity to utilize these otherwise unused cycles for offloading traditional systems tasks. Garbage collection appears to be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":351,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,11,90,3],"tags":[1787,1197,1782,884,1793,67],"class_list":["post-7817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-algorithms","category-computer-science","category-opencl","category-paper","tag-algorithms","tag-apu","tag-computer-science","tag-memory","tag-opencl","tag-performance"],"views":2513,"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hgpu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}