Keynotes

Polar Opposites: Next Generation Languages and Architectures

Kathryn S McKinley, University of Texas at Austin

Future hardware technology is on a collision course with modern programming languages. Adoption of programming languages is rare and slow, but programmers are now embracing high-level object-oriented languages such as Java and C# due to their software engineering benefits which include (1) fast development through code reuse and garbage collection; (2) ease of maintenance through encapsulation and object-orientation; (3) reduced errors through type safety, pointer disciplines, and garbage collection; and (4) portability. These programs use small methods, dynamic class binding, heavy memory allocation, short-lived objects, and pointer data structures, and thus obscure parallelism, locality, and control flow, in direct conflict with hardware trends.

At the other end of technology, the limits of silicon are on the verge of creating a dramatic shift in computer architectures. Due to wire scaling and clock rates, processors will soon access only a fraction of the chip in a single cycle. This limited reach will (1) necessitate partitioning structures such as caches and predictors, (2) make the memory hierarchy slower and more complex, and (3) require the processor to exploit fine grain instruction level parallelism (ILP) for performance. Radical hardware solutions promise to exacerbate current performance issues for modern languages.

We outline our total system approach to avoiding this collision. We present the TRIPS architectural solution to technology limits, and discuss its implications for modern languages, their compilers, and memory management. We include some of our recent results on cooperative caching, the influence of garbage collection on program performance, and online mechanisms for improving program locality.