Nova: Safe Off-Heap Memory Allocation and Reclamation

Ramy Fakhoury, Anastasia Braginsky, Idit Keidar, Yoav Zuriel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In recent years, we begin to see Java-based systems embrace off-heap allocation for their big data demands. As of today, these system rely on simple ad-hoc garbage-collection solutions, which restrict the usage of off-heap data. This paper introduces the abstraction of safe off-heap memory allocation and reclamation (SOMAR), a thread-safe memory allocation and reclamation scheme for off-heap data in otherwise managed environments. SOMAR allows multi-threaded Java programs to use off-heap memory seamlessly. To realize this abstraction, we present Nova, Novel Off-heap Versioned Allocator, a lock-free SOMAR implementation. Our experiments show that Nova can be used to store off-heap data in Java data structures with better performance than ones managed by Java’s automatic GC. We further integrate Nova into the open-source Oak concurrent map library, which allows Oak to reclaim keys while the data structure is being accessed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2023
EditorsAlysson Bessani, Xavier Defago, Junya Nakamura, Koichi Wada, Yukiko Yamauchi
ISBN (Electronic)9783959773089
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2024
Event27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2023 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: 6 Dec 20238 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameLeibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs
Volume286
ISSN (Print)1868-8969

Conference

Conference27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2023
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period6/12/238/12/23

Keywords

  • concurrency
  • memory reclamation
  • off-heap allocation
  • performance

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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