Garbage Collection and DSM Consistency
Paulo Ferreira and Marc Shapiro
INRIA - Project SOR
Abstract
This paper presents the design of a copying garbage collector for persistent
distributed shared objects in a loosely coupled network with weakly consistent
distributed shared memory (DSM).
The main goal of the design for this garbage collector is to minimize the
communication overhead due to collection between nodes of the system, and
to avoid any interference with the DSM memory consistency protocol.
Our design is based ont eh observation that, in a weakly consistent DSM
system, the memory consistency requirements of the garbage collector are
less strict than those of the applications. Thus, the garbage collector
reclaims objects independently of other copies of the same objects without
interfering with the DSM consistency protocol. Furthermore, our design
does not require reliable communication support, and is capable of
reclaiming distributed cycles of dead objects.
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