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International Workshop on Memory Management

IWMM 1992: Memory Management pp 103–115Cite as

Comprehensive and robust garbage collection in a distributed system

  • Distributed Systems I
  • Conference paper
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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 637))

Abstract

The overall goal of the Emerald garbage collection scheme is to provide an efficient “on-the-fly” garbage collection in a distributed object-based system that collects all garbage. and that is robust to partial failures.

The first goal is to collect all garbage in the entire distributed system; we say that the collection is comprehensive in contrast to conservative collectors that only collect most garbage. Comprehensiveness is achieved by employing a systemwide mark-and-sweep collection based on concurrently running collectors, one on each node.

The second goal of our collector is to be robust to partial failures. When facing node failures the collector will progress in the available parts of the system and, when necessary, wait for temporarily unavailable nodes to become available again. The scheme is being implemented on a network of VAXstations at DIKU. The full scheme employs two concurrent mark-and-sweep collectors on each node in the distributed system, one for comprehensiveness, one for expediency. Concurrency is achieved by using an object protection and faulting mechanism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIKU, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1, DK 2100, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark

    Niels Christian Juul & Eric Jul

Authors
  1. Niels Christian Juul
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  2. Eric Jul
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Yves Bekkers Jacques Cohen

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Juul, N.C., Jul, E. (1992). Comprehensive and robust garbage collection in a distributed system. In: Bekkers, Y., Cohen, J. (eds) Memory Management. IWMM 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 637. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017185

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0017185

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55940-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47315-2

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