=============================================================================== Multi Process Garbage Collector Copyright © 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development Company LP.
Author: Susan Spence (susan.spence@hpe.com)
Contributors: Evan Kirshenbaum, Lokesh Gidra, Susan Spence, Sergei Uversky.
Our state-of-the-art Multi Process Garbage Collector (MPGC) delivers automatic memory management for applications, enabling multiple applications to share objects in memory, while avoiding memory management errors and memory leaks. Whereas commercial garbage collectors for memory management today are typically single process and they work at the scale of only tens to hundreds of Gigabytes, MPGC is ground-breaking in its support for multi-process, fault-tolerant garbage collection, and in scaling to heaps greater than hundreds of Gigabytes. The current implementation delivers a fault-tolerant, on-the-fly, concurrent garbage collector, with zero stop-the-world pauses. MPGC is used by HPE's Managed Data Structures (MDS) library and other non-MDS applications, including applications written in unmanaged languages like C++.
MPGC runs and has been tested on x86 and ARM architectures. It can be used for automatic memory management by multiple application processes using a shared object heap in shared (volatile) memory. However, MPGC is really designed to deliver the benefits of automatic memory management on The Machine and other persistent memory architectures.
Releases of the MPGC source code are available open source on GitHub: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/mpgc
Maturity: Alpha.
MPGC has been developed as part of the Managed Data Structures research project at Hewlett Packard Labs. As such, releases of the MPGC source code made available on GitHub are not production quality, but rather "alpha" quality. The MPGC APIs have been specified and implemented, but MPGC is not functionally complete. MPGC has gone through basic testing, but may be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss.
MPGC is an active research project; we intend to make further releases with more and/or better features and bug fixes as the project continues.
The Multi Process Garbage Collector is distributed under the LGPLv3 license with an exception. See license files COPYING and COPYING.LESSER.
No dependencies.
A User's Guide to the Multi Process Garbage Collector is available on
the MPGC GitHub site:
https://github.com/HewlettPackard/mpgc/blob/master/doc/MPGC-User-Guide.pdf
This user guide describes in detail how C++ applications can create and use data in an MPGC-managed heap, and share data between processes, without having to determine when it is safe to free up shared memory, and without risk of corrupting the heap if a process crashes.
For instructions on installing MPGC, see INSTALL.md.
Limitations: Note that the fault-tolerant aspect of MPGC assumes that it is running in a system with persistent memory where caches are flushed on failure; otherwise, we do not guarantee that the heap will not be corrupted as a result of failures.
The Managed Data Structures software library, which uses MPGC for its
automatic memory management:
https://github.com/HewlettPackard/mds
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1.0 2016-09-20
- Initial release.
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2.0 2017-08-07
- Added support for weak pointers
- New, faster allocator