Concurrent non-deferred reference counting on the microgrid : first experiences

Abstract

We present a first evaluation of our novel approach for non-deferred reference counting on the Microgrid many-core architecture. Non-deferred reference counting is a fundamental building block of implicit heap management of functional array languages in general and Single Assignment C in particular. Existing lock-free approaches for multi-core and SMP settings do not scale well for large numbers of cores in emerging many-core platforms. We, instead, employ a dedicated core for reference counting and use asynchronous messaging to emit reference counting operations. This novel approach decouples computational workload from reference-counting overhead.