A parallel asynchronous garbage collection algorithm for distributed systems

The problem of distributed garbage collection is discussed. An algorithm for parallel distributed asynchronous garbage collection is presented. The liveness and safety properties of this method are demonstrated. The algorithm does not require a global clock, complex termination detection methods, or distributed synchronization techniques. A new color code is introduced to distinguish between local cells (black) and those that are exclusively accessible from the remote pointers (gray). The mutator operation is revised to handle a multiple mutator scheme on a given local memory. Simulation results show that the developed distributed and parallel algorithm performs much better than the sequential method as tested on a Balance 8000 computer