Ricardo Rocha

Abstract

Abstract
One common characteristic among current lock-free memory allocators is that they rely on the operating system to manage memory since they lack a lower-level mechanism capable of splitting and coalescing blocks of memory. In this paper, we discuss this problem and we propose a generic scheme for an efficient lock-free best-fit coalescing-capable mechanism that is able of satisfying memory allocation requests with desirable low fragmentation characteristics. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

Abstract
Hash tries are a trie-based data structure with nearly ideal characteristics for the implementation of hash maps. Starting from a particular lock-free hash map data structure, named Lock-Free Hash Tries (LFHT), we focus on solving the problem of memory reclamation without losing the lockfreedom property. We propose an approach that explores the characteristics of the LFHT structure in order to achieve efficient memory reclamation with low and well-defined memory bounds. Experimental results show that our approach obtains better results when compared with other state-of-the-art memory reclamation methods and provides a competitive and scalable hash map implementation, if compared to lock-based implementations. © 2019 IEEE.

Abstract
One of the main advantages of Prolog is its potential for the implicit exploitation of parallelism and, as a high-level language, Prolog is also often used as a means to explicitly control concurrent tasks. Tabling is a powerful implementation technique that overcomes some limitations of traditional Prolog systems in dealing with recursion and redundant subcomputations. Given these advantages, the question that arises is if tabling has also the potential for the exploitation of concurrency/parallelism. On one hand, tabling still exploits a search space as traditional Prolog but, on the other hand, the concurrent model of tabling is necessarily far more complex, since it also introduces concurrency on the access to the tables. In this paper, we summarize Yap's main contributions to concurrent tabled evaluation and we describe the design and implementation challenges of several alternative table space designs for implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation that represent different tradeoffs between concurrency and memory usage. We also motivate for the advantages of using fixed-size and lock freedata structures, elaborate on the key role that the engine's memory allocator plays on such environments, and discuss how Yap's mode-directed tabling support can be extended to concurrent evaluation. Finally, we present our future perspectives toward an efficient and novel concurrent framework which integrates both implicit and explicit concurrent tabled evaluation in a single Prolog engine.

Abstract