CONCURRENT AND DISTRIBUTED GARBAGE COLLECTION OF ACTIVE OBJECTS

This paper shows how to perform concurrent and distributed automatic g arbage collection of objects possessing their own thread of control, T he relevance of garbage collection and active objects to distributed a pplications is briefly discussed and the specific model of active obje cts used in the paper is explained. The collector is comprised of inde pendent local collectors, one per node, and a distributed global colle ctor, The mutator (application), the local collectors and the global c ollector run concurrently, An important part of this paper is the deta iled presentation of the algorithms necessary to achieve correct concu rrent operation among the collectors and between the collectors and th e mutator, The collector builds on previous algorithms for taking snap shots in distributed systems and for detecting termination.