Garbage Collecting the World

Abstract

Distributed symbolic computations involve the existence of remote references allowing an object, local to a processor, to designate another object located on another processor. To reclaim inaccessible objects is the non trivial task of a distributed Garbage Collector (GC). We present in this paper a new distributed GC algorithm which (i) is fault-tolerant, (ii) is largely independent of how a processor garbage collects its own data space, (iii) does not need centralized control nor global stop-the-world synchronization, (iv) allows for multiple concurrent active GCs, (v) does not require to migrate objects from processor to processor and (vi) eventually reclaims all inaccessible objects including distributed cycles.