Garbage collection for functional languages in a distributed system
Garbage collection is a helpful facility provided by many applicative languages such as Prolog, SISAL, FP, and Lisp. While these, and other, languages provide easy recognition of actions that may be executed in parallel, the garbage-collection algorithms used for single-machine environments become significantly more inefficient in multi-machine environments. Thus, in order to make effective use of these languages, more-efficient algorithms for collecting inter-machine structures is needed. Reference marking is the algorithm developed to meet these needs. It takes advantage of the semantics of applicative languages allowing each parallel action to be responsible for collecting any discarded structures it was responsible for creating. Simulation results comparing the performance of reference marking with other distributed garbage-collection algorithms are given. A variety of problem types and sizes are examined to determine the effects of particular styles of computation on each of the garbage-collection algorithms. The results gathered demonstrate the usefulness of the reference-marking algorithm in both uni- and multi-machine systems.
- Research Organization:
- Georgia Inst. of Tech., Atlanta (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 6565978
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
990220 -- Computers
Computerized Models
& Computer Programs-- (1987-1989)
990300* -- Information Handling
ALGORITHMS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
DATA PROCESSING
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
SIMULATION