A Methodology for Constructing Portable and Simple Global Garbage Collectors

Many garbage collectors on parallel computers are written in sequential languages, therefore thay are not portable across machines with different communication primitives. Moreover, the description of garbage collectors on distributed memory machines, which use asynchronous messages, is complex. We implemented a garbage collector for parallel object-oriented language Schematic by using Schematic itself. We show that a garbage collector can be more portable and simple by describing it on the top of parallel language, which is machine-independent and equipped with high level communication constructs. We implemented a garbage collector on distrubuted memory machine AP1000, and measured its performance.