An Implementation for Complete Asynchronous Distributed Garbage Collection

We expand an acyclic distributed garbage collector (the cleanup protocol of Stub-Scion Pair Chains) with a detector of distributed cycles of garbage. The whole result is as a complete and asynchronous distributed garbage collector. The detection algorithm for free distributed cycles is inspired by Hughes [5]. A local collector marks outgoing references with dates, which are propagated asynchronously between spaces. A central server computes the minimum of allowed dates, permitting cycles to be detected and cut. Our algorithm is both asynchronous and faulttolerant. Moreover, it can be adapted to large-scale systems. Finally, it requires few resources and it is easy to implement. 1 Introduction Automatic garbage collection is an important feature for modern high-level languages. However, if local garbage collection is pretty much a solved problem, distributed programming still lacks efficient cyclic garbage collection. Indeed, a distributed garbage collector should be asynchronous (all..