40774984
Performance enhancements to the Active Memory System
The Active Memory System - a garbage collected memory module - was introduced as a way to provide hardware support for garbage collection in embedded systems. The major component in the design was the Active Memory Processor (AMP) that utilized a set of bit-maps and a combinational circuit to perform mark-sweep garbage collection. The design can achieve constant time for both allocation and sweeping. In this paper two enhancements are made to the design of AMP so that it can perform one-bit reference counting that postpones the need to perform garbage collection. Moreover, a caching mechanism is also introduced to reduce the hardware cost of the design. The experimental results show that the proposed modification can reduce the number of garbage collection invocations by 76%. The speed-up in marking time can be as much as 5.81. With the caching mechanism, the hardware cost can be as small as 27 K gates and 6 KB of SRAM.
39527990
FPGA-based reconfigurable computing
12198410
Scalable hardware-algorithm for mark-sweep garbage collection
The memory-intensive nature of object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java has created the need for high-performance dynamic memory management. Object-oriented applications often generate higher memory intensity in the heap region. Thus, a high-performance memory manager is needed to cope with such applications. As today's VLSI technology advances, it becomes increasingly attractive to map software algorithms such as malloc(), free() and garbage collection into hardware. This paper presents a hardware design of a sweeping function (for mark-and-sweep garbage collection) that fully utilizes the advantages of combinational logic. In our scheme, the bit sweep can detect and sweep the garbage in a constant time. Bit-map marking in software can improve the cache performance and reduce number of page faults; however, it often requires several instructions to perform a single mark. In our scheme, only one hardware instruction is required per mark. Moreover, since the complexity of the sweeping phase is often higher than the marking phase, the garbage collection time may be substantially improved. The hardware complexity of the proposed scheme (bit-sweeper) is O(n), where n represents the size of the bit map.
18001825
Architectural support for dynamic memory management
Recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become more memory intensive. These applications tend to allocate dynamic memory prolifically. Moreover, automatic dynamic memory reclamation (garbage collection, GC) has become a popular feature in modern programming languages. As a result, the time consumed by dynamic storage management can be up to one-third of the program execution time. This illustrates the need for a high-performance memory management scheme. This paper presents a top-level design and evaluation of the proposed instruction extensions to facilitate heap management.
9645285
Using scratchpad to exploit object locality in Java
Performance of modern computers is tied closely to the effective use of cache because of the continually increasing speed discrepancy between processors and main memory. We demonstrate that generational garbage collection employed by a system with cache and scratchpad memory can take advantage of the locality of small short-lived objects in Java and reduce memory traffic by as much as 20% when compared to a cache-only configuration. Converting half of the cache to scratchpad can be more effective at reducing memory traffic than doubling or even quadrupling the size of the cache for several of the applications in SPECjvm98.
1021056
A performance perspective on the Active Memory System
Abstract One major problem of using Java in real-time and embedded devices is the non-deterministic turnaround time of dynamic memory management systems (memory allocation and garbage collection). For the allocation, the non-determinism is often contributed by the time to perform searching, splitting, and coalescing. For the garbage collection, the turnaround time is usually determined by the size of the heap, the number of live objects, the number of object collected, and the amount of garbage collected. Even with the current state-of-the-art garbage collectors (generational and incremental schemes), they may or may not guarantee the worst-case latency. Moreover, such schemes often prolong overall garbage collection time. In this paper, the performance analysis of the proposed Active Memory Module (AMM) for embedded systems is presented. Unlike the software counterparts, the AMM can perform a memory allocation in a predictable and bounded fashion (14 cycles). Moreover, it can also yield a bounded sweeping time regardless of the number of live objects or heap size. By utilizing the proposed system, the overall speedup can be as high as 23% compared to the garbage collection system of the JDK 1.2.2 running in classic mode.
29352440
Induced matchings in asteroidal triple-free graphs
An induced matching M of a graph G is a set of pairwise nonadjacent edges such that no two edges of M are joined by an edge in G. The problem of finding a maximum induced matching is known to be NP-hard even for bipartite graphs of maximum degree four. In this paper, we study the maximum induced matching problem on classes of graphs related to AT-free graphs. We first define a wider class of graphs called the line-asteroidal triple-free (LAT-free) graphs which contains AT-free graphs as a subclass. By examining the square of line graph of LAT-free graphs, we give a characterization of them and apply this for showing that the maximum induced matching problem and a generalization, called the maximum δ-separated matching problem, on LAT-free graphs can be solved in polynomial time. In fact, our result can be extended to the classes of graphs with bounded asteroidal index. Next, we propose a linear-time algorithm for finding a maximum induced matching in a bipartite permutation (bipartite AT-free) graph using the greedy approach. Moreover, we show that using the same technique the minimum chain subgraph cover problem on bipartite permutation graphs can be solved with the same time complexity.
34576803
Multi-modal gray-level histogram modeling and decomposition
Abstract In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal histogram thresholding method in which no a priori knowledge about the number of clusters to be extracted is needed. The proposed method combines regularization and statistical approaches. By converting the approaching histogram thresholding problem to the mixture Gaussian density modeling problem, threshold values can be estimated precisely according to the parameters belonging to each contiguous cluster. Computational complexity has been greatly reduced since our method does not employ conventional iterative parameter refinement. Instead, an optimal parameter estimation interval was defined before the estimation procedure. This predefined optimal estimation interval reduces time consumption while other histogram decomposition based methods search all feature space to locate an estimation interval for each candidate cluster. Experimental results with both simulated data and real images demonstrate the robustness of our method.
37599184
Finding frequent itemsets over online data streams
Abstract Conventional data mining methods for finding frequent itemsets require considerable computing time to produce their results from a large data set. Due to this reason, it is almost impossible to apply them to an analysis task in an online data stream where a new transaction is continuously generated at a rapid rate. An algorithm for finding frequent itemsets over an online data stream should support flexible trade-off between processing time and mining accuracy. Furthermore, the most up-to-date resulting set of frequent itemsets should be available quickly at any moment. To satisfy these requirements, this paper proposes a data mining method for finding frequent itemsets over an online data stream. The proposed method examines each transaction one-by-one without any candidate generation process. The count of an itemset that appears in each transaction is monitored by a lexicographic tree resided in main memory. The current set of monitored itemsets in an online data stream is minimized by two major operations: delayed-insertion and pruning . The former is delaying the insertion of a new itemset in recent transactions until the itemset becomes significant enough to be monitored. The latter is pruning a monitored itemset when the itemset turns out to be insignificant. The number of monitored itemsets can be flexibly controlled by the thresholds of these two operations. As the number of monitored itemsets is decreased, frequent itemsets in the online data stream are more rapidly traced while they are less accurate. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed through a series of experiments in order to identify its various characteristics.
9345376
Finding recently frequent itemsets adaptively over online transactional data streams,
A data stream is a massive unbounded sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Consequently, the knowledge embedded in a data stream is more likely to be changed as time goes by. Identifying the recent change of a data stream, especially for an online data stream, can provide valuable information for the analysis of the data stream. However, most of mining algorithms or frequency approximation algorithms over a data stream do not differentiate the information of recently generated data elements from the obsolete information of old data elements which may be no longer useful or possibly invalid at present. Therefore, they are not able to extract the recent change of information in a data stream adaptively. This paper proposes a data mining method for finding recently frequent itemsets adaptively over an online transactional data stream. The effect of old transactions on the current mining result of a data steam is diminished by decaying the old occurrences of each itemset as time goes by. Furthermore, several optimization techniques are devised to minimize processing time as well as memory usage. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is analyzed by a series of experiments to identify its various characteristics.
7532286
Finding recent frequent itemsets adaptively over online data streams
A data stream is a massive unbounded sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Consequently, the knowledge embedded in a data stream is more likely to be changed as time goes by. Identifying the recent change of a data stream, specially for an online data stream, can provide valuable information for the analysis of the data stream. In addition, monitoring the continuous variation of a data stream enables to find the gradual change of embedded knowledge. However, most of mining algorithms over a data stream do not differentiate the information of recently generated transactions from the obsolete information of old transactions which may be no longer useful or possibly invalid at present. This paper proposes a data mining method for finding recent frequent itemsets adaptively over an online data stream. The effect of old transactions on the mining result of the data steam is diminished by decaying the old occurrences of each itemset as time goes by. Furthermore, several optimization techniques are devised to minimize processing time as well as main memory usage. Finally, the proposed method is analyzed by a series of experiments.