Cooperating distributed garbage collectors for clusters and beyond

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First a distributed garbage collector (DGC) is presented that is optimized for remote method invocation in reliable networks, such as current clusters of workstations. Since the algorithm does not require extra acknowledgement messages, even while collecting, it does not increase the latency of a remote call. Then it is discussed how several DGCs can cooperate in networks that consist of different areas with respect to communication, i.e., of areas with different reliability properties. Proper placement and use of bridge objects allow to select an optimized DGC for every area.