An energy efficient garbage collector for java embedded devices

Griffin, Paul A.; Srisa-an, Witawas; Chang, J. Morris

doi:10.1145/1070891.1065943

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…[Griffin et al 2005] implemented a hybrid scheme between the standard Mark-Sweep Compact collector and reference counter. [Chen et al 2002b,a] proposed an adaptive GC strategy to optimize the power consumption by shutting down memory banks that hold only garbage objects.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of GC design on power and performance for Android

Hussein

Payer

Hosking

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference

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Small mobile devices have evolved to versatile computing systems. Android devices run a complete software stack, including a full Linux kernel, user land with several software daemons and a virtual machine to run applications. On these mobile systems energy is a scarce resource and needs to be handled carefully. Current systems rely on governors that adjust the frequency of individual cores depending on the system load. We measure energy consumption of different components of this complex software stack, including garbage collection (GC) of the Android virtual machine. Here we propose several extensions to the default GC configuration of Android, including a generational collector, across established dimensions of heap memory size and concurrency.Our evaluation shows that Android's asynchronous GC thread consumes a significant amount of energy. Therefore, varying the GC strategy can reduce total on-chip energy (by 20-30%) whilst slightly impacting application throughput (by 10-40%) and increasing worst-case pause times (by 20-30%). Our work quantifies the direct impact of GC on mobile system, enumerates the main factors and layers of this relationship, and offers a guide for analysis of memory behavior in understanding and tuning system performance.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of GC design on power and performance for Android

Hussein

Payer

Hosking

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference

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“…Moreover, Paul Griffin et al proposed a hybrid garbage collection scheme to appropriately lessen the number of GC triggers (i.e. the number of memory accesses), thereby resulting in a lower energy consumption [28]. In [29], Guilin Chen et al investigated how to reduce the energy consumption by tuning the garbage collector in a multibanked memory architecture.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [29], Guilin Chen et al investigated how to reduce the energy consumption by tuning the garbage collector in a multibanked memory architecture. Both of them [28], [29] achieve the energy efficiency by changing the policy of garbage collection in some way. In contrast, our approach simply exploits the GC triggering information and does not change the behavior of garbage collector.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Power-Saving Technique for the OSGi Platform

Chen

Lin

Yan

et al. 2012

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARYWith more digital home appliances and network devices having OSGi as the software management platform, the power-saving capability of the OSGi platform has become a critical issue. This paper is aimed at improving the power-efficiency of the OSGi platform, i.e. reducing the energy consumption with minimum performance degradation. The key to this study is an efficient power-saving technique which exploits the runtime information already available in a Java virtual machine (JVM), the base software of the OSGi platform, to best determine the timing of performing DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling). This, technically, involves a phase detection scheme that identifies the memory phase of the OSGi-enabled device/server in a correct and almost effortless way. The overhead of the power-saving procedure is thus minimized, and the system performance is well maintained. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed power-saving approach on an OSGi server, where the Apache Felix OSGi implementation and the DaCapo benchmarks were applied. The results show that this approach can achieve real power-efficiency for the OSGi platform, in which the power consumption is significantly reduced and the performance remains highly competitive, compared with the other power-saving techniques.

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“…So, this approach is suited for applications with a small memory footprint relative to embedded system memory size. Then, a hybrid Mark&Sweep and reference counting collector is developed by Griffin et al [9]. This hybrid collector reduces the number of collections compared to a classical Mark&Sweep strategy and therefore the impact of garbage collection, in terms of energy consumption, is also reduced.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory power optimization of Java-based embedded systems exploiting garbage collection information

Velasco

Atienza

Olcoz

2012

Journal of Systems Architecture

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a b s t r a c tNowadays, Java is used in all types of embedded devices. For these memory-constrained systems, the automatic dynamic memory manager (Garbage Collector or GC) has been always a key factor in terms of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) performance. Moreover, in current embedded platforms, power consumption is becoming as important as performance. Thus, in this paper we present an exploration, from an energy viewpoint, of the different possibilities of memory hierarchies for high-performance embedded systems when used by state-of-the-art GCs. This is a starting point for a better understanding of the interactions between the Java applications, the memory hierarchy and the GC.Hence, we subsequently present two techniques to reduce energy consumption on Java-based embedded systems, based on exploiting GC information. The first technique uses GC execution behavior to reduce leakage energy consumption taking advantage of the low-power mode of actual multi-banked SDRAM memories and it is intended for generational collectors. This technique can achieve a reduction up to 50% of SDRAM memory leakage.The second technique involves the inclusion of a software-controlled (scratch-pad) memory that stores GC instructions under the JVM control to reduce the active energy consumption and also improve the performance of the target embedded system and it is aimed at all kind of garbage collectors. For this last technique we have experimented with two different approaches for selecting the GC code to be stored in the scratchpad memory: one static and one dynamic. Our experimental results show that the proposed dynamic scratchpad management approach for GCs enables up to 63% energy consumption reduction and 25% performance improvement during the collector phase, which means, in terms of JVM execution, a global reduction of 29% and 17% for energy and cycles, respectively.Overall, this work outlines that the key for an efficient low-power implementation of Java Virtual Machines for high-performance embedded systems is the synergy between the GC choice, the memory architecture tuning, and the inclusion of power management schemes controlled by the JVM, exploiting knowledge of the GC behavior.

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An energy efficient garbage collector for java embedded devices

Cited by 9 publications

References 17 publications

Impact of GC design on power and performance for Android

Impact of GC design on power and performance for Android

A Power-Saving Technique for the OSGi Platform

Memory power optimization of Java-based embedded systems exploiting garbage collection information

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