Scaling managed runtime systems for future multicore hardware

textThe exponential improvement in single processor performance has recently come to an end, mainly because clock frequency has reached its limit due to power constraints. Thus, processor manufacturers are choosing to enhance computing capabilities by placing multiple cores into a single chip, which can improve performance given parallel software. This paradigm shift to chip multiprocessors (also called multicore) requires scalable parallel applications that execute tasks on each core, otherwise the additional cores are worthless. Making an application scalable requires more than simply parallelizing the application code itself. Modern applications are written in managed languages, which require automatic memory management, type and memory abstractions, dynamic analysis and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. These managed runtime systems monitor and interact frequently with the executing application. Hence, the managed runtime itself must be scalable, and the instrumentation that monitors the application should not perturb its scalability. While multicore hardware forces a redesign of managed runtimes for scalability, it also provides opportunities when applications do not fully utilize all of the cores. Using available cores for concurrent helper threads that enhance the software, with debugging, security, and software support will make the runtime itself more capable and more scalable. This dissertation presents two novel techniques that improve the scalability of managed runtimes by utilizing unused cores. The first technique is a concurrent dynamic analysis framework that provides a low-overhead buffering mechanism called Cache-friendly Asymmetric Buffering (CAB) that quickly offloads data from the application to helper threads that perform specific dynamic analyses. Our framework minimizes application instrumentation overhead, prevents microarchitectural side-effects, and supports a variety of dynamic analysis clients, ranging from call graph and path profiling to cache simulation. The use of this framework ensures that helper threads perturb the performance of application as little as possible. Our second technique is concurrent trace-based just-in-time compilation, which exploits available cores for the JavaScript runtime. The JavaScript language limits applications to a single-thread, so extra cores are worthless unless they are used by the runtime components. We redesigned a production trace-based JIT compiler to run concurrently with the interpreter, and our technique is the first to improve both responsiveness and throughput in a trace-based JIT compiler. This thesis presents the design and implementation of both techniques and shows that they improve scalability and core utilization when running applications in managed runtimes. Industry is already adopting our approaches, which demonstrates the urgency of the scalable runtime problem and the utility of these techniques.Computer Science