Dynamic Storage Reclamation or Garbage Collection (GC) refers to a system’s method of automatically reclaiming dynamically allocated storage that an application no longer needs. Garbage collection dates back to the nineteen sixties and was birthed in response to a need to automate the reclamation of such storage.
This course will expose students to the classical problem of dynamic storage reclamation or garbage collection. Students will survey the literature on garbage collection to become familiar with the progress that has been made since its inception.
This course will also expose students to the state-of-the-art in garbage collection technology and give them an opportunity to work on projects involving designing and implementing garbage collectors in the runtime environment of a garbage-collected language (e.g., Java).
Delvin Defoe – Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering
| Email: | defoe@rose-hulman.edu |
| Office phone: | (812) 877-8815 |
| Office address: | Moench F-214 |
| Home page: | http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~defoe |
| Office hours: | I strive to be in my office every day from 9:00 AM until 5:10 PM unless I’m in class or at a meeting. Please stop by at any time. If my door is shut, just knock. My public schedule is available at this location. |
Rose-Hulman's LINUX Users Group (LUG) would be happy to assist you with LINUX installation and system configuration.
Besides the instructors and LUG, other students in the course can often be a great source of help. And they will learn more if they explain things to you.
Don’t try to be the Lone Ranger in this course. If you find that you have worked on something for 30 minutes without making progress, it’s probably time to seek help.
Garbage Collection: Algorithms for Automatic Dynamic Memory Management, by Richard Jones and Rafael D Lins
Paperback: 379 pages
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Ltd (September 17, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN: 0 471 94148 4
Students will be responsible for reading research papers on garbage collection. Reading assignments on such papers will be made available to students on the class schedule page.
We’ll use Angel to post grades, materials that require restricted access (like homework solutions), and links to the course schedule, assignment descriptions, slides, quizzes, and handouts. Please note the emphasis on links. All these linked materials are available via any of the several mechanisms for accessing Public AFS data. Thus, you can get to the majority of course materials:
Students who successfully complete this course should be able to:
When we give a reading assignment, we seriously expect you to read it. In-class discussions will assume that you have done the reading and understood the “easy stuff” before class. You may of course ask about any details that you do not understand. We strongly believe that reading the assigned material will help you. You may not be able to “get by” without reading the assigned material. Besides, you did not come to Rose to “get by”; you came to do your best.
Your solutions to programming problems should be well-designed and well-documented. We may suggest working on some programming problems with another person; however we will designate some problems as individual assignments.
We plan to use the weights shown in the table below to assign final grades.
| Criteria | Weight |
|---|---|
| In-class Quizzes | 10% |
| Homework and Programming Problems | 20% |
| Major Team Project | 25% |
| Presentations | 15% |
| Exam 1 | 15% |
| Exam 2 | 15% |
Final grades are contingent on the following:
We will do our best to conform to the Rose-Hulman definition of the various grades, as described in the Academic Rules and Procedures. Note in particular that the phrase ”thorough competence to do excellent work“ appears there in the description of the “B” grade, and it further states that “B” and “B+” will not be given for mere compliance with the minimum essential standards of the course.
We will not grade on a curve, so every student could earn an “A”. However, it may require significant effort to do so.
We may adjust your overall average up or down by up to 5 points, based on your citizenship in the Dynamic Storage Reclamation learning community. This includes attendance, promptness, preparation for class, positive participation in class, constructive partnership in pair and group assignments, timely completion of various surveys, and peer evaluation of other students’ code and of your team members for group projects.
The in-class time in this course constitutes an important learning experience. After two unexcused absences, you must discuss continuation of the course with the instructor. Three unexcused absences will result in automatic failure of the course.
Homework and programming problems must be turned in on time if you want credit for them. No credit will be given for late work except in extreme circumstances.
We usually check our email several times daily (including most evenings) and we do our best to respond quickly. It is a good way to get answers to simple questions. We expect you to check your email daily (not necessarily on weekends, although even that is not a bad idea). When we send mail to you, we will use your Rose-Hulman address. If you do not currently read mail that is sent to that address, please have it forwarded to wherever you read mail.
When you send course-related email to us, please begin the Subject: line with DSR:, so that we can quickly pick it out from among the dozens of daily email messages that we receive.
We do our best to keep class interactive, but we recognize that sometimes it is hard as a student to stay focused on the class. With laptops in class, there are even more ways to become distracted. Unfortunately, these distractions are much more pernicious since it is very easy to get drawn into things like IM conversations or RSS feeds.
We strongly encourage you to turn off IM and email software and only use other software for things directly related to class. If you choose to use non-class-related software during class, then you must sit in the back row. Doing so will prevent your classmates from being distracted by what is on your screen.
Recall the Institute policy on academic misconduct:
“Rose-Hulman expects its students to be responsible adults and to behave at all times with honor and integrity.”
Exams and homework will be done on an individual basis. The simple rule of thumb for individual work is:
Never give or use someone else’s code or written answers.
Such exchanges are definitely cheating and not cooperation. The departmental statement on academic honesty has more detailed advice.
We encourage you to discuss the problems and general approaches to solving them with other students. However, when it comes to writing code, it should be your own work (or the work of your group if it is a group or partner assignment). If you are having trouble understanding how some library code works or pinning down a run-time or logic error in your program, by all means talk to someone about it.
If you use someone else’s ideas in your solution (or any other work that you do anywhere), you have to:
If you are ever in doubt about whether some specific situation violates the policy, the best approach is to discuss it with your instructor beforehand. This is a very serious matter that we do not take lightly. Nor should you.
In general, you should not look at another student’s code to get ideas of how to write your own code. Beginning the process of producing your own solution with an electronic copy of work done by other students is never appropriate.
Plagiarism or cheating will result in a negative score (i.e., less than zero) for the assignment or exam. Egregious cases will result in a grade of “F” for the course. More importantly, such dishonesty steals your own self-esteem. So don’t cheat.