Larchant-RDOSS: a Distributed Shared Persistent Memory and its Garbage Collector

Larchant-RDOSS is a distributed shared memory that persists on reliable storage across process lifetimes. Memory management is automatic: including consistent caching of data and of locks, collecting objects unreachable from the persistent root, writing reachable objects to disk, and reducing store fragmentation. Memory management is based on a novel garbage collection algorithm, that approximates a global trace by a series of local traces, with no induced I/O or locking traffic, and no synchronization between the collector and the application processes. This results in a simple programming model, and expected minimal added application latency. The algorithm is designed for the most unfavorable environment (uncontrolled programming language, reference bypointers, distributed system, non-coherent shared memory) and should work well also in more favorable settings. Key-words: distributed algorithm, distributed shared memory, distributed system, garbage collection, synchronization