Intel Haswell: Improving Parallel GC Performance

Intel Corporation Computer Science, 2013-14

Liaison(s): Todd Anderson, Neal Glew, Youfeng Wu
Advisor(s): Melissa O’Neill
Students(s): Joe Agajanian, Claire Murphy, Will Newbury, John Sarracino (PM)

Intel recently released the Haswell processor architecture. Haswell provides many new features, one of which is hardware support for a parallel execution model called transactional memory. In principle, hardware transactional memory can significantly improve the performance of parallel code. Our goal was to show performance gains in practice by improving the performance of garbage collection, a core technology at the heart of many computer systems.