“While working with an early Cilk++ adopter, it quickly became apparent that the default memory allocator shipped with the Windows C Run-Time Library can be a bottleneck in a multithreaded application. The Windows memory allocator has a single lock which it uses to serialize access to its internal structures. While this is safe, it proved to cause a serious loss of parallelism in the customer’s application.”
Cilk Arts developed a new allocator named “Miser”, inspired by the principles in Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications by Emery D. Berger, Kathryn S. McKinley, Robert D. Blumofe and Paul R. Wilson. Hoard is designed to minimize lock contention between threads, false sharing and memory drift. Detailed information about Hoard can be found at the Hoard website.
