The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 23, 2005
Filed:
Jun. 27, 2001
Nir N. Shavit, Cambridge, MA (US);
Steven K. Heller, Acton, MA (US);
Christine H. Flood, Westford, MA (US);
Nir N. Shavit, Cambridge, MA (US);
Steven K. Heller, Acton, MA (US);
Christine H. Flood, Westford, MA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A garbage collector employs a plurality of task queues for a parallel-execution operation in a garbage-collection cycle. Each task queue is associated with a different ordered pair of the threads that perform the parallel-execution operation in parallel. One of the threads, referred to as that task queue's 'enqueuer' thread, is the only one that can 'push' onto that queue an identifier of a dynamically identified task. The other thread, referred to as that task queue's “dequeuer,” is the only one that can “pop” tasks from that task queue for execution. Since, for each task queue, there is only one thread that can “push” task identifiers on to it and only one thread that can “pop” task identifiers from it, the garbage collector can share dynamically identified tasks optimally among its threads without suffering the cost imposed by making combinations of otherwise separate machine instructions atomic.