Monday, April 04, 2005

An Object-Aware Memory Architecture

A paper published on February at Sun's site, by Greg Wright, Matthew L. Seidl and Mario Wolczko: An Object-aware memory architecture. Quoting from the abstract:

Despite its dominance, object-oriented computation has received scant attention from the architecture community. We propose a novel memory architecture that supports objects and garbage collection (GC). Our architecture is co-designed with a Java Virtual Machine to improve the functionality and efficiency of heap memory management. The architecture is based on an address space for objects accessed using object IDs mapped by a translator to physical addresses. To support this, the system includes object-addressed caches, a hardware GC barrier to allow in-cache GC of objects, and an exposed cache structure cooperatively managed by the JVM. These extend a conventional architecture, without compromising compatibility or performance for legacy binaries.

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