Thu Apr 28, 4:15 pm, 3400 Boelter Hall.

The Metronome: Real-time Garbage Collection

David F. Bacon
IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center

The goal of the Metronome project is to expand the usability of
type-safe garbage-collected languages to tasks with critical time
dependencies, such as avionics, automotive control, audio/video,
space flight, robotics, and so on.  To this end we have developed
a real-time garbage collector capable of providing guaranteed
high utilization at resolutions down to a few milliseconds,
sufficient for the vast majority of such applications.

In this talk I will describe the Metronome technology, in
particular the interaction between bounding space consumption
and our scheduling approach which allows us to provide gauranteed
utilization levels.  I will then discuss key implementation
features, in particular the storage architecture and associatied
compiler transformations, which allow us to efficiently and
predictably control space utilization.

I will then give an overview of current work on reducing
worst-case pause times to a few hundred microseconds and the
application of probabilistic techniques to real-time systems.

Joint work with Perry Cheng, Dave Grove, and V.T. Rajan.


About the speaker:  David F. Bacon is a Research Staff Member at
IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, where he leads the Metronome
project which produced the first hard real-time garbage
collected system.  His algorithms are included in most compilers
and run-time systems for modern object-oriented languages, and
his work on Thin Locks was selected as one of the most
influential contributions in the 20 years of the Programming
Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) conference.
His recent work focuses on high-level real-time programming,
embedded systems, programming language design, and
computer architecture.  He holds a Ph.D. in computer science
from the University of California, Berkeley and received
his A.B. from Columbia University.  He holds 6 patents and
has served on the program committees of POPL, OOPSLA, and ISMM.
He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.

Host: Jens Palsberg