Hoard was designed primarily by Professor Emery Berger of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, based on his PhD thesis work at the University of Texas at Austin. The Hoard memory allocator has been in continuous development for over 15 years. Hoard has been licensed by numerous companies to improve their application performance, including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse, Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata. It also is part of the Fedora Linux distribution.

A technical paper describing an early version of Hoard appeared at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2000) – Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications (with Kathryn McKinley, Robert Blumofe, and Paul Wilson). This paper identifies key problems of previous memory allocators, including heap contention, space blowup, and allocator-induced false sharing, and shows how Hoard solves these problems.

While Hoard’s original design was effective (inspiring the Mac OS X memory allocator), Hoard now incorporates numerous technical advances that make it faster and more efficient than any system-provided memory manager.