Abstract
The ever increasing usage of simulations in order to produce digital twins of physical systems led to the creation of specialized equation-based modeling languages such as Modelica. However, compilers of such languages often generate code that exploits the garbage collection memory management paradigm, which introduces significant runtime overhead. In this paper we explain how to improve the memory management approach of the automatically generated simulation code. This is achieved by addressing two different aspects. One regards the reduction of the heap memory usage, which is obtained by modifying functions whose resulting arrays could instead be allocated on the stack by the caller. The other aspect regards the possibility of avoiding garbage collection altogether by performing all memory lifetime tracking statically. We implement our approach in a prototype Modelica compiler, achieving an improvement of the memory management overhead of over 10 times compared to a garbage collected solution, and an improvement of 56 times compared to the production-grade compiler OpenModelica.
Michele Scuttari
Ph.D. Student
Daniele Cattaneo
Postdoctoral Researcher
Federico Terraneo
Associate Professor
Federico Terraneo received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, and his Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano in 2015. Currently he holds a Postdoc position at Politecnico di Milano. His research interests include embedded systems and the application of principles of control theory to the design of software systems. Since 2008 he has been the main developer and maintainer of the Miosix embedded operating system.
Giovanni Agosta
Associate Professor
Giovanni Agosta, Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, holds a Laurea in Computer Engineering (2000) and a PhD in Information Technology (2004). His research focuses on compiler-computer architecture interaction, emphasizing performance, energy-efficiency, and security. He has authored 100+ papers, won multiple awards, and participated in 17 EU-funded projects.