Garbage collection and task deletion in distributed applicative processing systems

  • Authors:
  • Paul Hudak;Robert M. Keller

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • LFP '82 Proceedings of the 1982 ACM symposium on LISP and functional programming
  • Year:
  • 1982

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Abstract

The problem of automatic storage reclamation for distributed implementations of applicative languages is explored. Highly parallel distributed systems have several unique characteristics that complicate the reclamation process; in this setting, the deficiencies of existing storage reclamation schemes are thus noted. A real-time, effectively distributed, garbage collector of the mark-sweep variety, called the marking-tree collector, is shown to accomplish reclamation in parallel with the main computation, with no centralized data or control other than a logical rendezvous between phases of the collector. In addition, it is capable of finding and subsequently deleting active processes which are determined to be no longer relevant to the computation.