snmalloc: A message passing allocator

Paul Liétar, Theodore Butler, Sylvan Clebsch, Sophia Drossopoulou, Juliana Franco, Matthew J. Parkinson, Alex Shamis, Christoph M. Wintersteiger, David Chisnall
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Read: 06 July 2021

Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management
ISMM 2019
Phoenix, AZ, USA
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, USA
Pages 122-135
2019

snmalloc is an efficient multiprocessor memory allocator optimized for the asymmetric allocation / deallocation pattern found in pipelined programs.

It uses lock-free data structures, uses radix-trees to collect objects so that they can be sent in batches of 1MB by a curious multi-hop communication scheme, distinguish large (16MB+), medium (64kB+) and small objects.

Linked lists of free objects are added to input queues of other allocators which are checked on malloc/free calls. These objects are tagged with the destination allocator; if this is different from the allocator that receives them, it queues them to be sent to another allocator. It can take up to 7 hops to get to the true destination. (In practice, there is probably one allocator per thread and the number of threads is low enough that most objects just take one hop.)