Parallel Garbage Collection and Graph Reducer

In this paper' we investigate the problem of parallel evaluation of functional programs. We have developed a novel approach to deal with sharing in graph reduction. Share nodes are introduced to explicitly handle sharing. By using share nodes, we have a garbage collection method that is on-the-fly (real time), parallel. distributed. and incremental. In our parallel graph reducer, copying can be done in parallel to make an exponential growth of program tree nodes. Since each node represents a simple operation, the growth of program trees i s a natural distribution of computation work. Load balancing becomes very easy and can be done automatically. A simulator is implemented to simulate a tree structured parallel computer to run our graph reducer. Examples such as parallel matrix addition and multiplication are tested.