Abstract
The progressive demand for computational power has stimulated the design of distributed memory multiprocessors. This in turn caused extensive research into efficient implementations of parallel functional, logic and object-based languages. Automatic heapmanagement using garbage collection is often an integrated part of those implementations. However, distributed garbage collectors can introduce a bottleneck for distributed processing. Both the number of communication messages and the processor idle time may increase untolerably. Independently, Bevan and Watson [Be87, Wa87] proposed a method which solves these problems at the cost of using pointer indirection cells. This introduces an unacceptable delay to every object access. In this paper an alternative is described which does not suffer from this access delay. Besides explaining our method and showing its additional advantages, it is demonstrated that within the framework of pipelined RISC architectures, efficient architectural support for this method is easily achievable.
Keywords
This research has been supported by IBM, as a part of a joint study agreement.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
D. I. Bevan. Distributed Garbage Collection Using Reference Counting. Proc. of Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, June 1987.
H. Corporaal, T. Veldman and A.J. van de Goor. Reference Weight-based Garbage Collection for Distributed Systems. Proc. of the SION Conference on Computing Science in the Netherlands, Utrecht, November 1988.
Paul Chow. MIPS/X Instruction Set and Programmer's Manual. Computer Systems Laboratory Stanford University, November 1984.
J.M. Mulder e.a. A framework for application-specific architecture design. Proc. of the 14th symposium on computer architecture, May 1989.
Robert A. Shaw. Improving Garbage Collector Performance in Virtual Memory Stanford University, Tech. Rep. CSL-TR-87-323, March 1987.
Peter Steenkiste. Lisp on a Reduced-instruction-set Processor: Characterization and Optimization Stanford Univ, Computer Systems Lab, CSL-TR-87-324, March 1987.
David Ungar. Generation Scavenging: A Non Disruptive High Performance Storage Reclamation Algorithm. ACM Sigplan notices, Vol. 19, 5, May 1984.
Paul Watson and Ian Watson. An Efficient Garbage Collection Scheme For Parallel Computer Architectures. Proc. of Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, June 1987.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Corporaal, H. (1991). Distributed heapmanagement using reference weights. In: Bode, A. (eds) Distributed Memory Computing. EDMCC 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 487. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032949
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032949
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-53951-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46478-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive