| Garbage collection (GC) is one of the most important and
complex parts of the runtime system of programming languages. It
is further complicated in parallel and distributed environments.
GC is simply a must for anybody who
implements high-level programming languages and is sometimes desired even
by application programmers using languages that lack it (e.g., C/C++).
For people who want a GC for their languages or applications, the current
situation is unfortunate because many collectors are so tightly integrated
in a particular programming environment that they cannot simply be reused
for other contexts. This is understandable because GC tends to require
a tight cooperation with other components of a system, such as code generators
and communication layers.
We are working to improve this situation in parallel and distributed settings.
The goal of this project is to provide parallel/distributed garbage collectors
that is usable by C/C++ application programs and can easily cooperate with
other components for parallel and distributed software (e.g., communication
library of their own). We currently offer two separate GC systems:
a parallel collector on shared-memory multiprocessors
and a parallel collector on message passing (distributed)
environment. In future, we will unify these two systems
in a single one that works on clusters of multiprocessors. Both are
based on Boehm's
Conservative GC, a garbage collection library (mainly) for uniprocessors.
We extended it to parallel and distributed environments. Thanks to the
Boehm GC, our collector can be used by C programs simply as a replacement
of the malloc/free, recognizes interior pointers, and avoids excess retention.
Further Information
Publications
- Kenjiro Taura and Akinori Yonezawa, "An Effective Garbage
Collection Strategy for Parallel Programming Languages on Large Scale Distributed-Memory
Machines" In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles
& Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), June 1997. (gzipped
PostScript (letter), gzipped
PostScript (A4))
- Toshio Endo, Kenjiro Taura and Akinori Yonezawa, "A Scalable
Mark-Sweep Garbage Collector on Large-Scale Shared-Memory Machines"
In Proceedings of High Performance Networking and Computing (SC97), November
1997. (
gzipped PostScript(letter), gzipped
PostScript(A4) )
- Toshio Endo, "A Scalable Mark-Sweep Garbage Collector
on Large-Scale Shared-Memory Machines" Master thesis, Department
of Information Science, The University of Tokyo, February 1998. (gzipped
PostScript(A4))
- Hirotaka Yamamoto, Kenjiro Taura, Akinori Yonezawa. "Comparing
Reference Counting and Global Mark-and-Sweep on Parallel Computers"
In Lecture Notes for Computer Science (LNCS), Languages, Compilers, and
Run-time Systems (LCR98), volume 1511, pp. 205-218. May 1998.
(gzipped
Postscript(A4), gzipped
Postscript(letter))
- Hirotaka Yamamoto, Kenjiro Taura, Akinori Yonezawa. "A
Performance Comparison between Reference Counting and Global GC on Distributed-Memory
Parallel Computers" In Proceedings of Joint Symposium on Parallel
Processing (JSPP) (in Japanese). June
1998. (gzipped
Postscript(A4))
Related Pages
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Japanese version