Implementing a family of distributed garbage collectors

Abstract

This paper discusses implementations of distributed garbage collectors derived using a previously developed methodology which involves mappings of distributed termination detection algorithms (DTAs) to local garbage collection schemes. Implementations produced by such mappings preserve the safety and completeness properties of the original local collectors. Through our collector implementations we have come to understand that the derivation technique extends to distributed collection schemes with heterogeneous local collector behaviour. Our contribution, reported here, is the construction of an experimental platform, implementations of the Task Balancing DTA, an extension to the derivation methodology that minimises constraints on local collectors, together with three new mappings and their implementations.