Milestone, 666 of Them!

So today I hit 666 scrobbles/hits/plays of Slayer on my last.fm account! This is a really neat number, although not prime, it is the sum of the first 7 primes [1], and 7 is a prime too.  (This also happens to be my 66 post on this blog).

Sources:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/666_(number)

EDIT(6Aug2011): Whoops! I made a mistake, 666 is the sum of the first seven prime SQUARES.  Not the first seven primes.  Sorry!

-Matt

Region Based Memory Management

Aside from listening and witnessing some of the most righteous of music (I'm listening to Gogol Bordello right now), and caught some Iron Maiden, Primus, and Slayer at Soundwave last week, what have I been researching, is a question one might be asking themselves. Ok yeah that is one nasty grammatically incorrect piece of English. Well what have I been researching?

Region Based Memory Management! That's right, that is what my PhD is focused on. Sure RBMM is not fresh, but my goal is to implement it for Google's Go language. What I think will be the real unique pieces of research will be how we allocate our regions, dealing with parallization (a'la goroutines) and carrying information across multiple modules (cross-module analysis).

Backup just one second cowboy, neee hawwww! What in the name of doo dah is a region? Region based memory management is a way of managing memory at compile time, one might think of it as compile-time garabage collection. However, that is just not correct at all. At compile-time, via static analysis, dynamic memory allocation calls are located. The compiler can then emit code that will allocate objects that have the same lifetime into regions of contiguous memory. So its a neat little tango between compile-time and run-time communication. Anyways, this grouping of objects with similar lifetimes can benefit cache locality, as well as provide a fast way of deallocating objects, all at once, by just killing the region. That is fast. No need to visit each object individually and free it.

Since Go utilizes a garbage collector, we would like to leave it in place for dealing with cases where regions would live for a long, if not infinite time. Such a case would be when a global object aliases something that is dynamically allocated (in Go that would be via a call to 'new' or 'make'). Garbage collection is traditionally a "slow" process. In addition, collectors can be a burden to real-time systems, as they can slow the program's execution (or even stop it) allowing the collector time to clean-up objects that are no longer being used. Of course, there are parallel garbage collectors, which should not require a stop-the-world approach that traditional collectors implement. But, I am unaware of their actual processing capabilities/limitations.

TL;DR my thesis at this time poses to provide an elusive seductive dance between garbage collection and region based memory management. OhhhhHhh yeaaa mmmmmm mm that sounds like the sexxy.

-Matt

I went to church yesterday, SLAYERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRR (Soundwave was my church)

Being a music fan, and a lover of attending concerts, I often check the music schedules of places when I travel. When I got to Melbourne I soon learned of the most-awesomest musical orgy in this area, the Soundwave music festival. Well, that was my holy-land, and I proclaimed my pilgrimage would start on March the 4th. Well, yesterday, I was successful. For I have witnessed/experienced once more the love of Primus, Slayer, Iron Maiden, and some Rob Zombie. I didn't see all the shows I wanted to see, heck, there were 6 stages, but I had a blast. Note: Soundwave was one way of forcing myself to stay here in Melbs, even if I didn't like it (I scored my ticket pre-sale). So, my bud Mark picked me up at my house, we then picked up our other friend Ian, and made the pilgrimage. While things were already kickin' (the shows started at noon, we arrived at 2PM), we basically saw: DevilDriver, All that Remains, Primus, High on Fire, Murderdolls, Ill Nino, Slayer, Rob Zombie (very little of it), Queens of the Stone Age, and Kylesa.... ohhh yeah almost forgot... Iron Maiden!!!!!!!!!!! Some of the shows I have listed we did not see in entirety. But it was a blast! When Slayer hit the stage, awe man, it was crushing! The likes of data compression would have been impressed on how much space was compressed in so little time. People cover big area, slayer, people now in tightly packed area. Like one giant pulsating organism. Slayer is magic.

Much love

-Matt