Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Distributed Garbage Collection for Mobile Actor Systems: The Pseudo Root Approach

  • Conference paper
Advances in Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3947))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Automatic distributed garbage collection (GC) gives abstraction to grid application development, promoting code quality and improving resource management. Unreachability of active objects or actors from the root set is not a sufficient condition to collect actor garbage, making passive object GC algorithms unsafe when directly used on actor systems. In practical actor languages, all actors have references to the root set since they can interact with users, e.g., through standard input or output streams. Based on this observation, we introduce pseudo roots: a dynamic set of actors that can be viewed as the root set. Pseudo roots use protected (undeletable) references to ensure that no actors are erroneously collected even with messages in transit. Following this idea, we introduce a new direction of actor GC, and demonstrate it by developing a distributed GC framework. The framework can thus be used for automatic life time management of mobile reactive processes with unordered asynchronous communication.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Abdullahi, S.E., Ringwood, A.: Garbage collecting the internet: A survey of distributed garbage collection. ACM Computing Surveys 30(3), 330–373 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Agha, G.: Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bevan, D.I.: Distributed garbage collection using reference counting. In: Treleaven, P.C., Nijman, A.J., de Bakker, J.W. (eds.) PARLE 1987. LNCS, vol. 258/259, pp. 176–187. Springer, Heidelberg (1987)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Birrell, A., Evers, D., Nelson, G., Owicki, S., Wobber, E.: Distributed garbage collection for network objects. Technical Report 116, DEC Systems Research Center, 130 Lytton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301 (December 1993)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Blackburn, S.M., Hudson, R.L., Morrison, R., Moss, J.E.B., Munro, D.S., Zigman, J.: Starting with termination: a methodology for building distributed garbage collection algorithms. Aust. Comput. Sci. Commun. 23(1), 20–28 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chandy, K.M., Lamport, L.: Distributed snapshots: Determining global states of distributed systems. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 3(1), 63–75 (1985)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Dickman, P.: Incremental, distributed orphan detection and actor garbage collection using graph partitioning and Euler cycles. In: Babaoğlu, Ö., Marzullo, K. (eds.) WDAG 1996. LNCS, vol. 1151, pp. 256–272. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Hewitt, C.: Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages. Journal of Artificial Intelligence 8(3), 323–364 (1977)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Hudson, R.L., Morrison, R., Moss, J.E.B., Munro, D.S.: Garbage collecting the world: One car at a time. SIGPLAN Not. 32(10), 162–175 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Hughes, J.: A distributed garbage collection algorithm. In: Jouannaud, J.-P. (ed.) FPCA 1985. LNCS, vol. 201, pp. 256–272. Springer, Heidelberg (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kafura, D., Mukherji, M., Washabaugh, D.: Concurrent and distributed garbage collection of active objects. IEEE TPDS 6(4) (April 1995)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kafura, D., Washabaugh, D., Nelson, J.: Garbage collection of actors. In: OOPSLA 1990, pp. 126–134. ACM Press, New York (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ladin, R., Liskov, B.: Garbage collection of a distributed heap. In: International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Yokohama (June 1992)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lang, B., Queinnec, C., Piquer, J.: Garbage collecting the world. In: POPL 1992, pp. 39–50. ACM Press, New York (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Le Fessant, F.: Detecting distributed cycles of garbage in large-scale systems. In: Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Rhodes Island (August 2001)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Lermen, C., Maurer, D.: A protocol for distributed reference counting. In: ACM Symposium on Lisp and Functional Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, August 1986, pp. 343–350. ACM Press, Cambridge (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Maheshwari, U., Liskov, B.: Collecting cyclic distributed garbage by controlled migration. In: PODC 1995 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Maheshwari, U., Liskov, B.: Collecting cyclic distributed garbage by back tracing. In: PODC 1997, Santa Barbara, CA, pp. 239–248. ACM Press, New York (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Matocha, J., Camp, T.: A taxonomy of distributed termination detection algorithms. J. Syst. Softw. 43(3), 207–221 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Moreau, L.: Tree rerooting in distributed garbage collection: Implementation and performance evaluation. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 14(4), 357–386 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Piquer, J.M.: Indirect reference counting: A distributed garbage collection algorithm. In: Aarts, E.H.L., Rem, M., van Leeuwen, J. (eds.) PARLE 1991. LNCS, vol. 505. Springer, Heidelberg (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Puaut, I.: A distributed garbage collector for active objects. In: OOPSLA 1994, pp. 113–128. ACM Press, New York (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Rodrigues, H., Jones, R.: A cyclic distributed garbage collector for Network Objects. In: Babaoğlu, Ö., Marzullo, K. (eds.) WDAG 1996. LNCS, vol. 1151, pp. 123–140. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  24. Schelvis, M.: Incremental distribution of timestamp packets — a new approach to distributed garbage collection. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 24(10), 37–48 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Shapiro, M., Dickman, P., Plainfossé, D.: SSP chains: Robust, distributed references supporting acyclic garbage collection. Rapports de Recherche 1799, INRIA (November 1992)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Vardhan, A.: Distributed garbage collection of active objects: A transformation and its applications to java programming. Master’s thesis, UIUC, Urbana Champaig, Illinois (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Vardhan, A., Agha, G.: Using passive object garbage collection algorithms. In: ISMM 2002, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Berlin, June 2002, pp. 106–113. ACM Press, New York (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Varela, C.A., Agha, G.: Programming dynamically reconfigurable open systems with SALSA. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. OOPSLA 2001 Intriguing Technology Track Proceedings 36(12), 20–34 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Veiga, L., Ferreira, P.: Asynchronous complete distributed garbage collection. In: Babaoglu, O., Marzullo, K. (eds.) IPDPS 2005, Denver, Colorado, USA (April 2005)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Venkatasubramanian, N., Agha, G., Talcott, C.: Scalable distributed garbage collection for systems of active objects. In: Bekkers, Y., Cohen, J. (eds.) IWMM-GIAE 1992. LNCS, vol. 637, pp. 134–138. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  31. Vestal, S.C.: Garbage collection: An exercise in distributed, fault-tolerant programming. PhD thesis, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Wang, W., Varela, C.A.: Distributed garbage collection for mobile actor systems: The pseudo root approach. Technical Report 06-04, Dept. of Computer Science, R.P.I, Extended Version of the GPC 2006 Paper (February 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Watson, P., Watson, I.: An efficient garbage collection scheme for parallel computer architectures. In: Treleaven, P.C., Nijman, A.J., de Bakker, J.W. (eds.) PARLE 1987. LNCS, vol. 259, pp. 432–443. Springer, Heidelberg (1987)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  34. Worldwide Computing Laboratory. The SALSA Programming Language (2002), http://www.cs.rpi.edu/wwc/salsa/ (Work in Progress)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Wei-Jen Wang & Carlos A. Varela

Authors
  1. Wei-Jen Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Carlos A. Varela
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, 30013, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Yeh-Ching Chung

  2. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    José E. Moreira

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Wang, WJ., Varela, C.A. (2006). Distributed Garbage Collection for Mobile Actor Systems: The Pseudo Root Approach. In: Chung, YC., Moreira, J.E. (eds) Advances in Grid and Pervasive Computing. GPC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11745693_36

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11745693_36

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33809-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33810-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation